The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering Our Past

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Encounter Books, 2000 - History - 372 pages
A huge success in hardcover, The Killing of History argues that history today is in the clutches of literary and social theorists who have little respect for or training in the discipline. He believes that they deny the existence of truth and substitute radically chic theorizing for real knowledge about the past. The result is revolutionary and unprecedented: contemporary historians are increasingly obscuring the facts on which truth about the past is built. In The Killing of History, Windschuttle offers a devastating expose of these developments. This fascinating narrative leads us into a series of case histories that demonstrate how radical theory has attempted to replace the learning of traditional history with its own political agenda.

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Contents

PARIS LABELS AND DESIGNER CONCEPTS The Ascension of Cultural Studies and the Deluge of Social Theory
1
THE OMNIPOTENCE OF SIGNS Semiotics and the Conquest of America
39
BAD LANGUAGE AND THEATRICAL GESTURES Structuralism and Ethnohistory in the Pacific
71
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