Quotes from Fergus M. Bordewich

Far from the near sanctification of military service common in today´s United States, the Americans of 1790 regarded a standing army virtually by definition as the coercive arm of oppressive government, owing loyalty not to the public but to kings and dictators.--

Of the House of Representatives, Rep. James G. Blaine later remarked, "There is no place where so little deference is paid to reputation previously acquired, or to eminence won outside; no place where so little consideration is shown for the feelings or the failures of beginners. What a man gains, he gains by sheer force of his own character,

The past," as the British novelist L. P. Hartley wrote, "is a foreign country. They do things differently there.

The Underground Railroad was, in many ways, a seminal movement in American history, one that deserves far more recognition than it has received. It was a kind of prelude to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and it offered lessons in social activism, political resistance, and moral courage that continue to inspire Americans today.