Quotes About History

What the migrants learned by word of mouth has since been established as fact. Mississippi outstripped the rest of the nation in virtually every measure of lynching: the greatest number of lynchings, the most lynchings per capita, the most lynchings without an arrest or conviction, the most female victims, the most multiple lynchings, and on and on.

the lynching of Emmett Till was caused by the nature and history of America itself and by a social system that has changed over the decades, but not as much as we pretend.

Milam and Bryant were not on a political mission when they pounded on Moses Wright's door, and they did not kidnap Emmett Till beneath the banner of states' rights, racial integrity, or white supremacy. The white men carried out their brutal errand in an atmosphere created by the Citizens' Councils, the Ku Klux Klan, and the mass of white public opinion, all of which demanded that African Americans remain the subservient mudsill of Mississippi—or die.

People everywhere are joining to fight because of the way Emmett Till died—but also because of the way he was forced to live.

In the South's calculation it took only "one drop" of black blood to make a person black.

And it is no surprise that J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant would assume they could murder Emmett Till without

Anderson's particular alien contacts, who said they had come from Mars, explained that Earth had been colonized thousands of years ago by two extraterrestrial races which had amalgamated. These races supposedly had been responsible for the great pyramids. "Primarily

On October 31, 1952, U.S. Operation Ivy began with the detonation of Mike, the world's first high-yield two-stage thermonuclear device, at the Enewetak Atoll [formerly spelled Eniwetok] in the Pacific. At 10.4 megatons, the experimental liquid deuterium device exceeded the explosive power of all ordnance detonated in World Wars

Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1991); Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Noble as the ideas of the Declaration of Independence were, it was obvious before the ink was dry that they clashed with a central fact of everyday life in America: slavery.

Attacks on the principles of the Declaration began at an early point in American history. In the four decades before the Civil War, defenders of slavery explicitly rejected it, even calling it, as Senator John Pettit did in 1854, "a self-evident lie."63 Horrified by this, antislavery politicians rallied to the Declaration. They developed a constitutional interpretation that emphasized liberty and equality, and they denounced slavery as incompatible with the

One may learn a great deal about a people by the stories they tell of others.

I have no vision of any future, maitrakh. Not yours; not even mine. I was just thinking about children. Trying to imagine what it's like to try to raise them. Wondering how much of their character a family can mold, and how much is innate in the children themselves. She hesitated. Wondering if the evil in a family's history can be erased, or whether it always passes itself on to each new generation.

I did not refer to the legends themselves," Thrawn said, turning his glowing eyes on her. "But what is remembered says a great deal about those doing the remembering.

what is remembered says a great deal about those doing the remembering." For

Artists were individuals. But they were also products of their culture and history and philosophy. The weave of artist and culture was evident to the discerning eye. The fundamental pattern of a species could be sketched, then drawn, then fully fleshed out.

In the history of culture the discovery of zero will always stand out as one of the greatest single achievements of the human race.

if the market system had not arisen naturally, it would have been proclaimed the greatest invention in human history. For market competition leads a self-interested person to wake up in the morning, look outside at the earth and produce from its raw materials, not what he wants, but what others want. Not in the quantities he prefers, but in the quantities his neighbors prefer. Not at the price he dreams of charging, but at a price reflecting how much his neighbors value what he has done.

From 1776 to 1976 just five books reigned over economics in nearly unbroken succession: Smith's Wealth of Nations, Ricardo's Principles, Mill's Principles, Marshall's Principles, and Samuelson's Economics. What they lack in imaginative titles, they make up in endurance.

Marxism allows us to understand the role of economic and social contradictions in driving the movement of history, but it often provides an inadequate explanation of the actual politics of historical transformation—why change does or does not occur at a given time. It is on this question that psychoanalysis proves indispensable.

Of that time, there is still much we do not know.

he had saved his country with a pact negotiated with Hitler at Munich. He returned to England to declare, "I believe it is peace for our time . . . peace with honor." It was neither. At home, Roosevelt was in his second term, trying to balance the continuing need for extraordinary efforts to revive the economy with what he knew was the

He tells another story about all that dust in those days.

He tells another story about all that dust in those days. "My