Brad’s Reviews > Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History > Status Update

professional historians will have to position themselves more clearly within the present, lest politicians, magnates, or ethnic leaders alone write history for them.


While some of us debate what history is or was, others take it in their own hands.

"Public history is often now a tale of sheer power clothed in electronic innocence and lexical clarity. Image makers can produce on the screen, on the page, or on the streets, shows, slogans, or rituals that seem more authentic to the masses than the original events they mimic or celebrate."

The claims of the {Haitian] revolution were indeed too radical to be formulated in advance of its deeds. Victorious practice could assert them only after the fact. In that sense, the revolution was indeed at the limits of the thinkable, even in Saint-Domingue, even among the slaves, even among its own leaders...discourse always lagged behind practice.

"Lest accusations of political correctness trivialize the issue, let me emphasize that I am not suggesting that eighteenth-century men and women should have thought about the fundamental inequality of humankind in the way some of us do today. On the contrary, I am arguing that they could not have done so. But I am also drawing a lesson from the understanding of this historical impossibility."

Access to human status did not lead ipso facto to self-determination. In short...in Condorcet, as in Mirabeau, as in Jefferson, when all is said and done, there are degrees of humanity.

If the account was indeed fully comprehensive of all facts it would be incomprehensible.

Much like a note-taker who highlights almost everything...

Selectivity is functionally necessary, and revelatory.

The presences and absences embodied in sources or archives are neither neutral nor natural. They are created...Mentions and silences are thus active, dialectical counterparts of which history is the synthesis.

Silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives; the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives) and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance.