Quotes from Hampton Sides

The Tea Party has very close affinities with independent third-party movements like the George Wallace movement. The Tea Party is still inchoate, still trying to figure out what it's going to become.

The thing about Memphis is that it's pleasingly off-kilter. It's a great big whack job of a city. The anti-Atlanta. You go there, and you can't believe the things people will say, the way they think, the wobbling orbits of their lives. There's an essential otherness.

Americans have a profound longing for heroes - now perhaps more than ever. We need our explorers, our sports icons, our Medal of Freedom winners, our Nobel laureates. We need our Greatest Generation warriors, our 'Sully' Sullenbergers, our Neil Armstrongs. On some level, we still subscribe to the myth of the man in the white hat.

I don't concentrate on any one period of history; I like to locate my stories in wildly different eras and places. I seem to be drawn to large, sprawling, uncomfortable swaths of American history, finding embedded within them a tight narrative that involves strife, heroism, and survival under difficult circumstances.

I find there's a thin, permeable membrane between journalism and history, and though some academic historians take a dim view of it, I gather a lot of strength and professional inspiration from passing back and forth across it.

I think of America not so much as a single country but as a constellation of groups out there competing for air time, energetically expressing themselves and luxuriating in their right to govern themselves. Freedom is that great vaunted word that's always applied to our country - and rightly so.

I am not one of those people who believe that MLK achieved more in martyrdom than he could have if he'd lived: imagine what a guiding influence he could have on the world were he still among us.

When the Americans were trying to conquer the Navajos, they felt this need to capture Canyon de Chelly like it was the Navajo capital. It was a meeting place and a sanctuary of last refuge. To control Canyon de Chelly was to control the Navajo people.

Sometimes it takes a brush with eternity - a crash, an illness, some shock to the system - to get you really thinking about what you want to do with your limited time here, and why you're living on this wobbling dirt clod in the first place.

I majored in Southern history in college, and much of my early work at my first job - as a staff writer at 'Memphis' magazine - focused on race relations.

These men suffered enough for a hundred lifetimes, and no one in this country should be allowed to forget it.

We do not want to go to the right or left, but straight back to our own country!

He belonged to the men who have cared for great things, not to bring themselves honor, but because doing great things could alone satisfy their natures.

For poverty is miserable. It is ugly, disorganized, rowdy, sick, uneducated, violent, afflicted with crime. Poverty demeans human dignity. The demanding tone, the inarticulateness, the implied violence deeply offended us. We didn't want to see it on our sacred monumental grounds. We wanted it out of sight and out of mind.

Then she spoke with Yolanda, her eldest child, with whom she'd been shopping all afternoon for an Easter dress. Mommy, I'm not going to cry, Yoki said resolutely. I'll see him again in heaven. But something was bothering her, something clearly nagged at her young conscience. Should I hate the man who killed my father? she asked. Coretta shook her head. No, darling, your daddy wouldn't want you to do that.

This same strain of transcendent "love-your-enemies" thinking guided Young, Abernathy, and the others as they began to contemplate their leader's death. As Young put it, "We aren't so much concerned with who killed Martin, as with what killed him." It

I thought we'd been forgotten," the prisoner said. "No, you're not forgotten," Robbins said. "We've come for you.

Filipinos were famous for their garrulousness. They were the Irish of Asia, it was sometimes said—warm, openhearted, story-loving, with unslakable appetites for the latest rumor or fact.

the man was incapable of accepting blame, or assuming responsibility, for the mistakes that had been made. Already he was beginning to cover his tracks, to write his own posterity papers. He had started to formulate a defense for himself, a counter-narrative that, in many ways, would appear to be delusional. He would argue that he had known all along that the Chinese were going to intervene en masse. He had seen it coming for many weeks.

Wallace seemed to draw strength from the restiveness in the air. "He has a bugle voice of venom," a commentator from the New Republic wrote, "and a gut knowledge of the prejudices of his audience." A Newsweek correspondent covering the Wallace rallies, noting "the heat, the rebel yells, the flags waving," and the legions of "psychologically threadbare" supporters, declared that Wallace "speaks to the unease everyone senses in America.

As he saw it, the central issue had shifted from the purely racial to the economic. King likened the situation to a lifelong prisoner who is released from jail after the warden discovers that the man was falsely accused all along. Go ahead, you're free now, the jailer says. But the prisoner has no job skills, no prospects, and the jailer doesn't think to give him money for the bus fare into town.

a sense that history had passed them by, that their brothers and fathers and uncles had participated in something momentous while they had not.

More than 150 Cheyenne, mostly women and children, were murdered in cold blood that day, in a massacre that is now widely regarded as the worst atrocity committed in all the Indian wars.

a curious gizmo that a bearded Scotsman named Alexander Graham Bell was calling his "telephone." (Bell would read from Hamlet's soliloquy at one end of the hall, and attendees at the other could plainly hear the inventor's voice issuing from a little speaker. "My God, it talks!" exclaimed one prominent visitor, Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil.)