Quotes About History

But in the intervening decades, something curious had happened, an act of what psychologists today might term recovered memory. Locals had reclaimed a past of their own , in which Todd County was staunch rebel territory, a pastoral land of Southern belles and brave Confederates. History, like nature, knows no jumps. Robert Penn Warren once wrote. Except the jump backward

History is lived forward but it is written in retrospect,' the English historian C.V. Wedgwood observed. 'We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only.

the inscription at its base put San Jacinto on a par with Waterloo and other exalted fights. The defeat of Santa Anna, the self-styled 'Napoleon of the West, led to the annexation of Texas, war with Mexico, and the acquisition of one third of the present area of the American nation. As such, San Jacinto was one of the decisive battles of the world.

In principle, rememberance of the War could be a way to probe these scars, many of which trailed back to the 1860's. But reenactments did precisely the opposite, blandly reconciling North and South in s grand spectacle that glorified battlefield valor and the stoicism of civilians.

They're pushing the envelope in terms of authenticity," the Camp Chase Gazette editor, Bill Holschuh, told me when I phoned for his opinion. "About the only thing left is live ammunition and Civil War diseases. I hope it doesn't come to that.

Silence over Europe's recent past was the necessary condition for the construction of a European future.

What, then, should we have learned from 1989? Perhaps, above all, that nothing is either necessary or inevitable.

Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation; thus the progress of historical studies is often a danger for national identity . . . The essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things'. Ernest Renan

During the long century of constitutional liberalism, from Gladstone to LBJ, Western democracies were led by a distinctly superior class of statesmen.

How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else? Perhaps we might start by reminding ourselves and our children that it wasn't always thus.

dÄ›jiny nacismu – a v?bec vÅ¡ech forem totalitarismu – nelze plnÄ› pochopit, pokud je omezíme na vyprávÄ›ní o zlých lidech, kteÃ…â"¢í se vÄ›domÄ› a zámÄ›rnÄ› dopouÅ¡tÄ›jí zlo?in? s cílem páchat zlo

since throughout the years 1945-49 a consistent majority of Germans believed that 'Nazism was a good idea, badly applied'.

The history of the 20th century West is in large measure the history of efforts to answer these questions. The responses proved spectacularly successful:

The past was neither as good nor as bad as we suppose: it was just different. If we tell ourselves nostalgic stories, we shall never engage the problems that face us in the present - and the same is true if we fondly suppose that our own world is better in every way. The past really is another country: we cannot go back. However, there is something worse that idealising the past - or presenting it to ourselves and our children as a chamber of horrors: forgetting it.

Among the speakers at the graveside was Viktor Orbán, the young leader of the Young Democrats, who could not help noting that some of the Communists present at Nagy's reburial were the same who, just a few years before, had so strenuously falsified the very revolution whose praises they were now singing.

Nothing in its life so became the Soviet Union as the leaving of it

A differenza della memoria, che conferma e rafforza se stessa, la storia contribuisce al disincanto. Quasi tutto ciò che ha da offrire è sconfortante, addirittura devastante, il che spiega perché non sia sempre politicamente prudente sbandierare il passato come arma con la quale bastonare un popolo per le sue precedenti colpe. Ma la storia dev'essere imparata, e periodicamente imparata di nuovo.

History is not written as it was experienced, nor should it be. The inhabitants of the past know better than we do what it was like to live there, but they were not well placed, most of them, to understand what was happening to them and why.

The European dilemma is

Racism had no place in the Marxist lexicon; dead Jews were posthumously assimilated into the same local communities that had so disliked them when they were alive. But

Over the past thirty years we have thrown all this away.

In a popular Soviet-era joke, a listener calls up 'Armenian Radio' with a question: 'Is it possible', he asks, 'to foretell the future?' Answer: 'Yes, no problem. We know exactly what the future will be. Our problem is with the past: that keeps changing'. So

Like Germany, Russia and Turkey had once played an imperial role in European affairs. And many Russians and Turks had shared the uncomfortable fate of Europe's ethnic German communities: displaced heirs of an autocratic power now reduced to resented and vulnerable minorities in someone else's nation state, the tidal refuse of imperial retreat.

Not for the first time in international disputes over Germany, France was its own worst enemy.