Quotes from Tony Horwitz

Draw your revolvers & bowie knives, & cool them in the heart's blood of all those damned dogs, that dare defend that damned breathing hole of hell," David Atchison, a former U.S. senator from Missouri, told cheering Southerners encamped outside Lawrence on May 21, "never to slacken or stop until every spark of free-state, free-speech, free-niggers, or free in any shape is quenched out of Kansas!" When

While Americans tried to justify and glorify their Indian-killers, George Armstrong Custer in particular

In their attitude to history, some New Zealanders resembled die-hard white Southerners in America, who enshrined Confederate leaders and symbols without acknowledging the offense this might cause to others. Sheila

The world of the rural poor remained what it had been for generations: a day's walk in radius, a tight, well-trod loop between home, field, church, and, finally, a crowded family grave plot.

These westbound pioneers slogged through the morass on foot, or in wagons drawn by mules and oxen. Impossible for them to conceive that their mud march would one day become sport for modern Americans

At one stop in New Zealand, an Englishman bartered for sex. He was presented with a boy; when he complained, he was presented with another. The English related this incident with amusement, as a cruel joke. But the Maori may have supposed that homosexuality was the English norm. How else to account for the absence among them of women and children?

Even now as I write, they are leading old John Brown to execution in Virginia for attempting to rescue slaves!" Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote in his diary on December 2. "This is sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind, which will come soon.

Whereas, Slavery, throughout its entire existence in the United States, is none other than a most barbarous, unprovoked, and unjustifiable War of one portion of its citizens upon another portion," the preamble began, "WE, CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES, AND THE OPPRESSED PEOPLE … ORDAIN AND ESTABLISH FOR OURSELVES, THE FOLLOWING PROVISIONAL CONSTITUTION." Brown's

The only person of color in any of the photographs was a black waiter. Blacks were otherwise barred from the dance hall, as were locals of Mexican descent. In the Texas of that day, laws and customs known as Juan Crow subjected Hispanics to discrimination and segregation similar to that inflicted on African Americans.

We can't condone what the Spanish did; it seems barbaric to us," Larry said. "But I admire their tenacity, giving up everything familiar to come here. It would have been like traveling to the moon today." Tim agreed. "Unless you reenact Mother Teresa, you're going to run into problems if you judge people by today's moral standards.

Was there such a thing as politically correct remembrance of the Confederacy? Or was any attempt to honor the Cause inevitably tainted by what Southernerners once delicately referred to as their 'peculiar institution?

We're not migrating people,' she said. 'We live in our old houses, and eat on our old dishes and use our old silverware everyday. We're close to the past and comfortable with it. We've surrounded our lives with the pictures of all our relatives hanging on the walls, and we grow up hearing stories about them. It gives these things personality beyond just the material they're made of.

Anything you got to do with your own kind in secret, something's wrong with it. You feel bad about it inside.

Jewish-Southern culture had also bred the ultimate in fusion food: Gershon Weinberg's pork and ribs barbecue restaurant in Alabama.

Myth is more important than history. History is arbitrary, a collection of facts. Myth we choose, we create, we perpetuate.

Cook, judging from his journals, was not a pious man. A product of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, he valued reason above all else, and showed little patience for what he called "Priest craft" and "superstition.

Look at these buttons," one soldier said, fingering his gray wool jacket. "I soaked them overnight in a saucer filled with urine." Chemicals in the urine oxidized the brass, giving it the patina of buttons from the 1860s. "My wife woke up this morning, sniffed the air and said, 'Tim, you've been peeing on your buttons again.

For Robert Lee Hodge, it was also a way of life. As the Marlon Brando of battlefield bloating, he was often hired for Civil War movies.

Hung be the Heavens in Scarlet

My life has been of but little worth mostly fild [sic] up with vanity.

Van Laar wasn't a climate change denier, nor did he talk defensively of the United States' appetite for oil. Rather, he confessed, "I don't give much of a fuck, and nobody I know does, either, because this industry is giving me a future, even if it's a short one and we're all about to toast together.

Bowlin was previously divorced and had learned a thing or two. Set of titties or a college education-buy either of those for your old lady and she's done, he said, She doesn't need you anymore.

The best you can do is catch an echo of the man. You can never reach out and touch him.

We've always lived in the past in Selma, and we still do. But the past has changed on us. It included a lot of stories it didn't used to.