May 21, 1999
In a New Book, Historians Conduct a Moral Inquiry Into the Past
What is the moral task of the historian?
Simply to describe? To prescribe? Or to make the glories of the past a rebuke to the present?
None of the above, argue the contributors to Moral Problems in American Life: New Perspectives on Cultural History, a new book from Cornell University Press edited by Karen Halttunen and Lewis Perry. In fact, writes T.J. Jackson Lears, a professor of history at Rutgers
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