Word: historians
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...sense, the formal foreign policy lessons that the U.S. learned from Viet Nam have been easier to absorb than the deeper psychological and personal meanings, which will be years in unfolding. Says Columbia University Historian Henry Graff: "America has learned for the first time that not everything it attempts comes off successfully. What we regarded as decency, honor and pride were not implemented in the world satisfactorily to make others see us as we thought we ought to be seen. That this could have happened to us is what The Deer Hunter is really all about...
Vast amounts of money were and are dispensed to buy, bribe or bully the loyalty of many Third World students. William Corson, the intelligence historian, cites one former CIA official as saying in 1976. "By 1985 we'll own 80 per cent of the Iranian government's second and third-level officials." One can almost see Ayatollah Khomeini's beard turn a whiter shade of grey. This ridiculous statement follows from the agency's incurable optimism about its own power and the success of its programs. The official failed to note that once in place only about one ex-student...
...experts emphasize, as do Jimmy Carter and Administration spokesmen, that last week's pact was but a single step toward a comprehensive peace. Says Hisham Sharabi, a Georgetown University historian and president of the National Association of Arab Americans: "The treaty doesn't even touch the central problem of Palestinian self-determination. As a result, the Arab world is more bitter and frustrated than ever...
Levenson's later work, though often highly praised, remained a focus for controversy, some of which persists in scholarly journals today. The implications of his method and vision, what he expected of the historian placed heavy demands on those who wrote (and read) history, demands that became clearer as he completed his largest work, Confucian China and its Modern Fate...
...Confucian China he treated not the problem of Confucian China's decline into irrelevance, into history, but an understanding that would reinforce Levenson's understanding of comparable problems in other traditions. For some, this resulted in a distressing call for historical relativism, for the basic comparison that juxtaposes the historian's own time with every other. Only with confidence in himself, Levenson held, could a historian make sense of the past--the historian had to "take one's own day seriously, retaining the moral need to declare oneself and stand somewhere, not just swim in time...