Historians sometimes forget that history is continually being made and experienced before it is studied, interpreted, and read.

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问题     Historians sometimes forget that history is continually being made and experienced before it is studied, interpreted, and read. These latter activities have their own history, of course, which may impinge in unexpected ways on public events. It is difficult to predict when "new pasts" will overturn established historical interpretations and change the course of history.
    In the fall of 1954, for example, C. Vann Woodward delivered a lecture series at the University of Virginia which challenged the prevailing dogma concerning the history, continuity, and uniformity of racial segregation in the South. He argued that the Jim Crow laws of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries not only codified traditional practice but also were a determined effort to erase the considerable progress made by Black people during and after Reconstruction in the 1870’s. This revisionist view of Jim Crow legis- lation grew in part from the research that Woodward had done for the NAACP legal campaign during its preparation for Brown v. Board of Education. The Supreme Court had issued its ruling in this epochal desegregation case a few months before Woodward’ s lectures.
    The lectures were soon published as a book—The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Ten years later, in a preface to the second revised edition, Woodward confessed with ironic modesty that the first edition "had begun to suffer under some of the handicaps that might be ex- pected in a history of the American Revolution published in 1776." That was a bit like hearing Thomas Paine apologize for the timing of his pamphlet Common Sense, which had a compara- ble impact. Although Common Sense also had a mass readership, Paine had intended to reach and inspire: he was not a historian, and thus not concerned with accuracy or the dangers of histori- cal anachronism. Yet, like Paine, Woodward had an unerring sense of the revolutionary moment, and of how historical evidence could undermine the mythological tradition that was crushing the dreams of new social possibilities. Martin Luther King, Jr. testified to the profound effect of The Strange Career of Jim Crow on the civil rights movement by praising the book and quoting it frequently.
The "new pasts" mentioned in line 8 can best be described as the

选项 A、occurrence of events extremely similar to past events.
B、history of the activities of studying, interpreting, and reading new historical writing.
C、change in people’s understanding of the past due to more recent historical writing.
D、overturning of established historical interpretations by politically motivated politicians.
E、difficulty of predicting when a given historical interpretation will be overturned .

答案C

解析 L8所说的“新史实”是指:A.“events similar to past”无。B.“study,interpret,read”这些行为的历史。这是对此句的误解。见难点解释。C.正确。由于近来的新历史写作而使公众对过去事件的理解有变化。见难点解释。D.推翻过去政治化的历史解释。无。E.预料何时一个历史解释就被推翻很难。此说法文中有,但不在此处,而在L7~10。
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