Quotes from Mo Rocca

When it comes to war, we focus more on the mainstream coverage of the event, rather than the event itself. People dying is never funny. Protest puppets are always funny.

I wish I had played team sports. I think every kid should. Teamwork builds character - teaches people about leadership and cooperation.

I love Christmas. Frosty the Snowman, peace on Earth and mangers, Salvation Army bell ringers and reindeer, the movie 'Meet Me in St. Louis,' office parties and cookies.

Oh, this has got to be something humorus.

the press hailed him as "the Genius of Freedom," on a par with Sumner and Lincoln himself.

In 1799, he moved to a relatively small house in the expensive and fashionable London neighborhood of Mayfair, where, in the words of an article written shortly after his death, he "established himself as a refined voluptuary.

It's probably not coincidental that corsets passed from the world at the same time as "fainting couches.") But it wasn't health concerns that killed the corset; it was World War I. The need for metal for ammunition led the US War Industries Board in 1917 to urge women to stop buying corsets. Serendipitously, the very first modern bra had been patented only three years earlier, by debutante Caresse Crosby.

The North won the war, but the South won the textbooks (blink and you might have missed Reconstruction in high school history class) and the movie house: in one scene in D. W. Griffith's 1915 landmark and deeply racist film The Birth of a Nation, black legislators are depicted drinking, eating chicken, and putting their bare feet up on desks in the South Carolina statehouse. The movie's message was clear: black people were inherently corrupt and unequipped to lead.

Men they had been trained to regard as subhuman were now their representatives in Washington, not to mention their governors, judges, sheriffs, and schoolmasters. In reaction, the region saw the flourishing of domestic terrorist groups like the Red Shirts in South Carolina, the White League in Louisiana, and the White Liners in Mississippi. Violence became part of everyday politics.

the incongruity of slaves waiting on the author of the Declaration of Independence.

He occupied the very seat once held by Jefferson Davis, who had left the Senate to become the president of the Confederacy. (After the war Davis had been apprehended attempting to flee to Cuba, disguised in his wife's clothing.)