Bruce Jackson

All governments in all wars have used all the means at their disposal to put their own motives, decisions and actions, and the actions of their military forces, in the best possible light.

War is big and there are only so many reporters and only so many places for their words and images to appear. Choices are made constantly.

Bridges are perhaps the most invisible form of public architecture.

I'm a schoolteacher and a writer. So that's what I do.

All too often, academic departments defend their territory with the passion of cornered animals, though with far less justification.

It is not at all clear how much the media influences public opinion and how much public opinion influences the media.

Filmmakers who use narrators pay a price for taking the easy way: narrated films date far more quickly than films without narrators.

Well, I think everybody's a little jealous of the Vietnam Wall, even people from wars that already have good monuments. You have a monument like the Wall and nobody ever forgets your war, you can bet on that.

The key fact missed most often by social scientists utilizing documentary films for data, is this: documentary films are not found or reported things; they're made things.

Perhaps the most important lesson of the New Social Historians is that history belongs to those about whom or whose documents survive.

We entered the 20th century trying to deal with three ideas purporting to define or describe or explain three spheres of action, development and conflict: Darwin on the natural world, Freud on the internal world, Marx on the economic world.

The daily press, the immediate media, is superb at synecdoche, at giving us a small thing that stands for a much larger thing. Reporters on the ground, embedded or otherwise, can tell us about or send us pictures of what happened in that place at that time among those people.