Reading Comprehension

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 legislation 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 expected 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 comparable 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 historical 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.



Which of the following is the best example of writing that is likely to be subject to the kinds of "handicaps" referred to in line 27?
(A) A history of an auto manufacturing plant written by an employee during an auto-buying boom
(B) A critique of a statewide school-desegregation plan written by an elementary school teacher in that state
(C) A newspaper article assessing the historical importance of a United States President written shortly after the President has taken office
(D) A scientific paper describing the benefits of a certain surgical technique written by the surgeon who developed the technique
(E) Diary entries narrating the events of a battle written by a soldier who participated in the battle

Answer is C. Recording historical importance of US Presidency is talking about the past rather than noting the importance of Presidency in the contemporary scenario. Refer the 2nd and 3rd sentences of the 1st para - "the latter activities have a history of their own" "new pasts might overturn historical interpretations". So the current presidency might overturn the historical importance recorded by the article.

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