Quotes from Arthur Herman

By 2200 B.C.E., five hundred years before Hammurabi issued his law code in Babylon, the civilization of the Indus Valley was a flourishing urban world of small brick houses and straight narrow streets, clean, efficient, and uniform, ruled by all-powerful theocrats whose temples were the very cities themselves.14

concentration of wealth in capitalist countries must inevitably lead to war. That intense concentration—Britain, France, Germany, and the United States together, Lenin noted, controlled nearly 80 percent of the world's financial capital—had reduced the possibility for fresh profits in capitalist countries themselves, including the United States.

while their generals' strategies committed them to taking the offensive, the new tools of modern warfare gave the overwhelming advantage to the defender.

I don't think he is a bad man," Clemenceau would sometimes say of Wilson, "but I have not yet made up my mind as to how much of him is good."35

Fifty-five thousand casualties for five hundred yards' gain on the Champagne front in February 1915; 60,000 lost again that spring at the Battle of Saint-Mihiel; 120,000 in May at Arras. The next year brought the slaughter at Verdun stretching from February to June, with 315,000 total French casualties. Then came the French support for the British offensive along the Somme from July to November, in which another 200,000 were killed or wounded—all for little significant gain.

The United States (in the person of Wilson) was now in the habit of dictating unilaterally what happened in the world without asking anyone's consent, and then letting its Allies catch up.

Once lead this people into war," Wilson ruminated, "and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance . . .

Wilson worried that the Constitution itself would not survive: "a nation can't put its strength into a war and keep its head level; it has never been done."13

his fellow senators were glad, too. They congratulated him on his fisticuffs with the pacifists. Some said there were rumors that Lodge had actually killed Bannwart, which had made the senator very popular in their home states.

One of the votes against war came from the very first woman ever to sit in the House of Representatives, Jeannette Rankin

now, there was a democratic government in Berlin willing to renounce all its conquests east and west, and to relinquish huge stockpiles of arms, making a renewal of war all but impossible.

In Wilson's mind, the signing represented the defeat not simply of Germany but of an entire way of organizing the world. Balance of power, armed alliances, secret treaties, "might makes right"—all these assumptions would now be thrown out.

To Wilson, however, it would be worth the sacrifice. By entering the war, America was also transforming the conflict from a competition for empire and national interests into a crusade to make the world safe for democracy and to secure mankind's hopes for future peace.

Acceding to Roosevelt's request would have cemented Wilson's standing with pro-war Republicans; turning him down alienated them permanently.

The Progressive president was also a keen white supremacist and insisted on segregating the U.S. Army in the same way he had most of the federal government

Howard Coffin, president of the Society of Automotive Engineers, declared, "Twentieth-century war demands that the blood of the soldier must be mingled with three to five parts of the sweat of the men in the factories, mills, mines, and fields of the nation in arms"—

The archetypal dwelling of the American frontier, the log cabin, was in fact a Scots development, if not invention. The word itself, cabine, meant any sort of rude enclosure or hut, made of stone and dirt in Scotland, or sod and mud in Ireland.

Out of the effort to cut back on civilian use of fuel, it was the Federal Fuel Administration that first introduced daylight saving time a year later, in 1918.

The term used to describe them was rednecks, a Scots border term meaning Presbyterians. Another was cracker, from the Scots word craik for "talk," meaning a loud talker or braggart. Both words became permanent parts of the American language, and a permanent part of the identity of the Deep South the Ulster Scots created.

The basic lesson of Indian history was already established. Material power like kingdoms, and kings, including Alexander the Great, comes and goes. But spiritual power, embodied in religion and caste and spiritual unity with Brahman, the changeless essence of the universe, lasts forever. Prime

Rejection of the racial equality clause was a particularly bitter grievance for members of the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and their spokesman, W. E. B. Du Bois.)

Please do not misunderstand me," he once told Wilson. "We too came into the world with the noble instincts and the lofty aspirations which you express so often and so eloquently. We have become what we are because we have been shaped by the rough hand of the world in which we have to live and we have survived only because we are a tough bunch.

It was Wilson and Wilson alone who was the source of the problems that haunted the Peace Conference and, afterward, the Treaty of Versailles.

There was Wilson's overweening spiritual arrogance, which Nicolson saw as part of the president's Presbyterian inheritance. There was Wilson's thin-skinned response to the slightest criticism or opposition, but above all, there was, as Wilson himself admitted, the American president's "one-track mind.