He seems laboring to construct history -- almost atom by atom -- against a case that brands him, essentially, one of the worst men on the planet.
The second path is how Mexicanas' diverse constructions of landscapes, rivers, homes, gardens, kitchens and the like portray culture, express gender, construct history, and establish powerful claims to space.
But in a final gallery this carefully constructed history nearly collapses.
This lovingly constructed history... evokes not only the dynamism of the American past but also the constant presence of war and violence in our national life.
Toll's diligently constructed history, stretching from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the Battle of Midway, calls attention to vital yet lesser-known episodes, including the desperate defense of Wake Island and the secret efforts of America's code-breakers.
s a result, the novel's more serious concerns — deliberations on how the past suffuses the present, the ultimate unknowability of another's grief, the painstaking task of constructing history in the absence of witnesses, the weight of emotional inheritances — are swamped by less interesting minutiae.
"Pacific Crucible," Ian W. Toll's useful and diligently constructed history of the first seven months of the Pacific War, calls our attention to many such pivotal figures, who, as we move further and further away from the period, have shrunk almost to a pinpoint in our rearview mirrors.
There are two assumptions built into this constructed history of quilting -- that the practice is a decorative craft, not a feature of fine art, and that the field is occupied by nameless women whose work exists beyond their authorship.
And, not least, it's a commercial mind-set energized by the success of smart, inventive and thoughtfully constructed histories like Erik Larson's "Devil in the White City".
I am constructing histories from a necessarily subjective view, which is no more or less real than any of the other attempts to describe that time or event".
And in order to preserve shared, adaptive life across generations in all of the various social orders, it was socially necessary to construct and maintain interpretive orderings of natural and social realities, as well of creatively imagined origins and genealogies and constructed histories, by which to meaningfully order individual and shared life.
