Quotes About History

A series of droughts between AD 760 and 800 seem to have been the trigger for famine that hit the common people disproportionately hard. It was the last straw for a society teetering on the edge of alienation and conflict.

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When the team excavated, they uncovered the shattered ruins of a fortress, over fifteen centuries old, with massive walls and eight towers, matching the description in the Koran. They also figured out what had happened: The constant removal of water from the watering hole undermined the fortress, which one day collapsed into a sinkhole and was buried by drifting sands. The legend recorded in the Koran was based on a real event.

In the twentieth century the Mormon Church sent a number of well-funded archaeologists to Mexico and Central America to try to confirm the stories through site excavations. Although this resulted in valuable, high-quality research, it also proved difficult for the scientists themselves; facing clear evidence that disproved the Mormon view of history, some of the archaeologists ended up losing their faith, and a few of those who voiced their doubts were excommunicated.

It seems that a civilization-wide catastrophe involving the "death" of all these cities occurred at approximately the same time, around 1500—the time of the Spanish conquest. Yet the Spanish never conquered the region; they never explored or even penetrated these remote jungles.

Douglas Preston

New York Public Library.

Did you know that all ladies at Louis XIV's court at Versailles were required to have a thirteen-inch waist or less? And that their dresses weighed between thirty and forty pounds?

Douglas Preston

EXCLUSIVE: LOST CITY DISCOVERED IN THE HONDURAN RAIN FOREST In search for legendary "City of the Monkey God," explorers find the untouched ruins of a vanished culture.

The survivors are deprived of that vital human connection to their past; they are robbed of their stories, their music and dance, their spiritual practices and beliefs—they are stripped of their very identity.

Douglas Preston

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints identified the Maya as one of the lost tribes of Israel, the Lamanites, as chronicled in The Book of Mormon, published in 1830.

The Maya created a vibrant and brilliant society that, in the end, failed to adjust to a changing environment and the needs of its people;

the Mosquitia civilization vanished everywhere all at once—in a sudden, civilization-wide catastrophe.

the New York Public Library.

One biologist told me that what probably saved many indigenous Indian cultures from complete extinction were the mass rapes of native women by European men; many of the babies from those rapes inherited European genetic resistance to disease.

Project The Forgotten Room Impact The Third Gate The Monster of Florence Terminal Freeze    (with Mario Spezi) Deep Storm

The buckskin shirt launched one of the most voracious collecting careers in American history. Heye became obsessed with all things Native American, and he would eventually amass a collection of a million pieces. In 1916, he established the Museum of the American Indian on upper Broadway in New York City to house his collection. (In 1990, the museum moved to Washington, DC, and became part of the Smithsonian.) Heye

The world's last great pandemic was the Spanish flu outbreak in 1918 that killed a hundred million people—about 5 percent of the world's population. If a pandemic like that were to happen again, it would spread faster and might be impossible to contain.

Douglas Preston

A table of statistics for the island of Hispaniola tells the story: Date: 1492 Native Population: ~500,000 (disputed) Date: 1508 Native Population: 60,000 Date: 1510 Native Population: 33,523 Date: 1514 Native Population: 26,334 Date: 1518 [before smallpox] Native Population: 18,000 Date: 1519 [after smallpox] Native Population: 1,000 Date: 1542 Native Population: 0

There are only a few really high-profile archaeological cultures in the world: Egypt and the Maya.

an Enigma machine, a set of gears of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, a