Criticism
Some critics have complained that Atlantic history is little more than imperial history under another name. Others argue that it is simultaneously too expansive (pretending to subsume both of the American continents, Africa and Europe, without seriously engaging with them) and too small (arbitrarily isolating the Atlantic from other bodies of water).
Steele (2009), a Canadian scholar, argues that Atlantic history will tend to draw students beyond their national myths, while offering historical support for such policies as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Organization of American States, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), the New Europe, Christendom, and even the United Nations. He concludes, "The early modern Atlantic can even be read as a natural antechamber for American‐led globalization of capitalism and serve as an historical challenge to the coalescing New Europe. No wonder that the academic reception of the new Atlantic history has been enthusiastic in the United States, and less so in Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal, where histories of national Atlantic empires continue to thrive."
Read more about this topic: Atlantic History
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance. He becomes a source of blessings rather than wages. Criticism is sacrilege, doubt is heresy.”
—Ben Hecht (1893–1964)
“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)