Quotes from Tony Horwitz

No way can be found in this boasted land of civilization and Christianity to punish the perpetrators of this bloody and monstrous Crime," Grant lamented of Colfax. "The spirit of hatred and violence is stronger than law.

Lebanese, like chain smokers and heavy drinkers, are always trying to thrust their vice on others.

Lolling on the narrow pier, surrounded by these mocha-colored youths, I became aware of my own pallid body in an unaccustomed way. "Like cats," George Biddle, an American painter, wrote of islanders in the 1920s, "they fall naturally into harmonious poses.

Daijiro said the group was composed of retired fruit and vegetable wholesalers on a week-long tour of America. They were visiting three places only: Niagara Falls, Las Vegas and Atlanta. "We want to see the history and beauty of America," Daijiro explained.

mad monk, minus the spiritual insight.

looked about as romantic and welcoming as a tar pit. I later learned that producers of the 1962 Marlon Brando film Mutiny on the Bounty had imported white sand from America so Matavai Bay would match the Hollywood image of a tropical island.

Cuba must be ours," declared Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis. He also wanted the Yucatán peninsula, so that the Gulf of Mexico would become "a basin of water belonging to the United States." His fellow Mississippian, Senator Albert Brown, coveted Central America. "I want these countries for the spread of slavery," he said. "I would spread the blessings of slavery, like the religion of our Divine Master, to the uttermost ends of the earth.

I respect those most who do what I want to do least.

Olmsted's initial faith in reasoned discourse had also waned. In the course of his travels, the South's "leading men" had struck him as implacable: convinced of the superiority of their caste-bound society, intent on expanding it, and utterly contemptuous of the North. "They are a mischievous class—

But in the intervening decades, something curious had happened, an act of what psychologists today might term recovered memory. Locals had reclaimed a past of their own , in which Todd County was staunch rebel territory, a pastoral land of Southern belles and brave Confederates. History, like nature, knows no jumps. Robert Penn Warren once wrote. Except the jump backward

History is lived forward but it is written in retrospect,' the English historian C.V. Wedgwood observed. 'We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only.

the inscription at its base put San Jacinto on a par with Waterloo and other exalted fights. The defeat of Santa Anna, the self-styled 'Napoleon of the West, led to the annexation of Texas, war with Mexico, and the acquisition of one third of the present area of the American nation. As such, San Jacinto was one of the decisive battles of the world.

In principle, rememberance of the War could be a way to probe these scars, many of which trailed back to the 1860's. But reenactments did precisely the opposite, blandly reconciling North and South in s grand spectacle that glorified battlefield valor and the stoicism of civilians.

They're pushing the envelope in terms of authenticity," the Camp Chase Gazette editor, Bill Holschuh, told me when I phoned for his opinion. "About the only thing left is live ammunition and Civil War diseases. I hope it doesn't come to that.

they could not see how the North could be so foolish as to determinedly prevent the extension of Slavery." Doing so would harm industry and commerce—which was all they thought truly mattered in the North. "This was the end of their track.

The mudders we'd met couldn't have been more open and hospitable. They'd generously shared their beverages, hobby, and attitudes-which together comprised a garish stereotype of the rural white South. Unlike Olmsted, I wasn't undercover. But I still felt like an infiltrator.

For [Beth] Davis, Fitzgerald's [Louisiana] story carried another, broader message for Americans. 'If veterans could come together so soon after the War and forgive and forget, then surely we can overcome our differences,' she said. 'Old wounds were healed here, old barriers overcome. Seems like we should be able to do the same.

This may sound sexist,' Joslyn said, 'but my theory is that men like the Civil War because it's an action story, they're caught up in the battlefield drama. The prisoners are an emotional side of the War. Women are attracted to all that raw feeling, we understand it better....

There are people one knows and people one doesn't. One shouldn't cheapen the former by feigning intimacy with the latter.

I am an agnostic on most matters of faith, but on the subject of maps I have always been a true believer. It is on the map, therefore it is, and I am.

You asked how I'd define prejudice. That's it. Making assumptions about people you've never met.

Everywhere, it seemed, I had to explore two pasts and two presents; one white, one black, separate and unreconcilable. The past had poisoned the present and the present, in turn, now poisoned remembrance of things past.

Hardcore chicken!

The past was a consumable, subject to the national preference for familiar products. And history, in America, is a dish best served plain. The first course could include a dollop of Italian in 1492, but not Spanish spice or French sauce or too much Indian corn. Nothing too filling or fancy ahead of the turkey and pumpkin pie, just the way Grandma used to cook it.