Quotes About History

freedom of the press from prior censorship was instituted in 1695.

The era of mass education and the standardization of the English language left such expressions as marks of uneducated people in the American South

History has never been dominated by majorities, but only by dedicated minorities who stand unconditionally on their faith," he says.

Christian nationalism looks backward on a fictionalized history of America's allegedly Christian founding. It looks forward to a future in which its versions of the Christian religion and its adherents, along with their political allies, enjoy positions of exceptional privilege and power in government and in law.

historian" of "America's Christian Founding.

What David Barton and the leaders of the Hobby Lobby corporation don't want you to know is that America's founders explicitly and proudly created the world's first secular republic. It seemed the point of the Hobby Lobby ad was not to celebrate America's history but to counterfeit it.

In August 2012, Barton's Christian publishing house, Thomas Nelson, halted production of the tome, announcing that they had lost confidence in it. "There were historical details—matters of fact, not matters of opinion, that were not supported at all

Other observers may reasonably use terms like "theocracy," "dominionism," "fundamentalism," or "Christian right." I use those terms where appropriate, but often prefer "Christian nationalism" in referring to the whole, because it both reflects the political character of the movement and because it makes clear its parallels between the American version and comparable political movements around the world and throughout history.

reducing public education to a consumer experience for parents that allows them to "choose" to funnel taxpayer money into schools that discriminate, teach pseudoscience and fake history, and promote contempt for those who are different isn't a way to improve our system of education.

The biggest fraud of Christian nationalism—that the United States was founded as a Christian nation—is also the movement's source of its greatest weakness.

The Georgia Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church unanimously resolved "that slavery, as it exists in the United States, is not a moral evil.

In God We Trust" was adopted as the national motto in 1956;

As the historian and author Randall Balmer writes, "It wasn't until 1979—a full six years after Roe—that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right's real motive: protecting segregated schools."33

he makes the case that "the move from Africa to America was a vast increase of freedom for the Negro, materially and spiritually as well as personally."61

The Jews were the first monotheistic culture in history. They believed in one God and one God only. The Greco-Roman world of Herod's day was polytheistic. They believed in many gods, and much of their worship was sexual in nature.

Why must people always assume we moderns knew more than any of the previous cultures? It simply isn't true, evidence proves otherwise.

Disaster calls us to action. They call us to levels of compassion and courage we did know we could reach. They smash us with sorrow and lift us with determination and moral resolved, the way a wave both makes and lifts us in the same wild movement. Disaster transforms sorrowful love into a force strong enough to change the trajectory of history….Dear Mary Oliver, do you think this might now be how we do the work of loving a weary, reeling world? And don't we have to try?

the ignorance of a bigwig who asked if Michelangelo's fresco The Last Judgment was about a trial of Mussolini.

Family history of anxiety, depression,

Among a certain type of creative men, there was a history of strong, if difficult friendships. From Wordsworth and Coleridge to John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd, these were creative friendships with bonds deeper, stronger than the shared creativity.

Maybe there's something instinctive in us, that we're drawn to human habitation and can't resist a ruin, the way newborn babies respond to a crude drawing of a face. These are the rarities in human history, the places from which we've retreated. These once-inhabited places play a different air to the uninhabited; they suggest the lost past, the lost Eden, not the Utopia to come.

I stopped in the tiny garden that encloses the Tolsta war memorial. The bronze plaque lists too many names for this small place; the same surnames recur over and again. The memorial, in the shape of an open book, also remembers the many soldiers who were returning to Lewis from the Great War, only to be drowned when their ship, the Iolaire, struck rocks outside Stornoway Harbour, which is a difficult one to make sense of.

Bulstrode Whitelocke, chronicler of events during the Commonwealth

The Nominated Parliament - nicknamed the Barebones Parliament after one of its members, Praisegod Barebones