History Out of Joint: Essays on the Use and Abuse of History

In History Out of Joint, Sande Cohen considers the ways in which historical narratives summon up a past and lay down a future in the ever—multiplying intellectual debates of contemporary public culture. As competing factions advance contradictory principles to validate or discredit their preferred accounts of the past and the present, Cohen argues that the fundamental question of how these principles themselves should be addressed—of what truly constitutes the use or abuse of history—has be...