Quotes About History

The 1927 Supreme Court ruling that allowed Carrie Buck to be forcibly sterilized gave every state the green light to continue or begin sterilizing those deemed unfit to produce children, all in the name of "race betterment.

Everyone is calling it the Spanish flu, even though it didn't originate in Spain. No one is sure where it came from. Spain has been the first to speak openly about it in its newspapers.

Everything beautiful has a story it

This ghost was the ship.

What was it he sensed beneath the charm of Adelaide's wide ordered streets, grand Georgian and Victorian buildings and symmetrical leafy green squares? It is variously known as the Garden City, the City of Churches, the Athens of the South, the jewel in the national crown of arts and sciences. A city, above all, cultured and civilised. But when Salman Rushdie watched night fall in Adelaide, it was not a soft velvet cloak of harmony that he saw descend on this city.

The best fiction is history

There are pragmatic as well as moral grounds for the United States to follow Germany's lead [in dealing with it's past human rights crimes]. American media may have largely ignored the reasons we decided to destroy Hiroshima or oust the democratically elected governments in Iran or the Congo. Other nations' media has not. Few Americans are quite aware of how little credibility we retain in other parts of the world.

While systematic racism infects processes and affects lives all over America, Southern awareness of history makes it impossible to ignore. Moreover, the influence of the South on American political culture is disproportionate to the size of the region. Focusing on the Deep South is not a matter of ignoring the rest of the country, but

Just how much life is left in Confederate ghosts became clear to the world, at the latest, with the election of Donald J. Trump.

During a 2015 meeting with representatives of those countries, a European Union official dismissed their claims with the words, "We cannot correct history. What happened, happened." One wishes he'd read Améry: "What happened, happened. This sentence is just as true as it is hostile to morals.

It's still not clear that the South lost the war," said Diane. "It's driving the national agenda, after all. You can see it with Trump; that's the same population who elected George Wallace.

Mississippi is a place where the resistance to the Enlightenment is out in the open, making it anything but obsolete.

Social justice activists in the South, for example, who are struggling to force their neighbors to face the ways their racist history informs the racist present, are above all aware of how hard it all is. The acknowledgments are too defensive, the racism too tenacious, the impulse to insist on one's own victimization too

Social justice activists in the South, for example, who are struggling to force their neighbors to face the ways their racist history informs the racist present, are above all aware of how hard it all is. The acknowledgments are too defensive, the racism too tenacious, the impulse to insist on one's own victimization too strong.

We are historical beings, unable to describe ourselves without describing ourselves in space and time.

The focus on Auschwitz is a form of displacement for what we don't want to know about our own national crimes.

Shortly after the war's end, posters went up all over the British and American zones [in Berlin]. Under a photograph of corpses at Bergen-Belsen was printed the sentence THIS IS YOUR FAULT.

How we remember the past constrains the possibilities we consider for the future.

If the name Ole Miss evokes football fields and magnolias for its alumni, it evokes tear gas and shotguns for others.

I will argue that the 2016 election resulted, in large part, from America's failure to confront its own history.

African American history in all its torment and glory is American history, and we cannot move forward until all Americans see it that way.

Monuments are not about history; they are values made visible.

All those stately columns gracing mansion porticoes look elegant till you know what ideology was written into the architecture.

As Cummings pointed out when the museum opened in 2014, there are more Holocaust museums in the United States than in Israel, Germany, and Poland combined, but not one devoted to slavery.