Quotes About History

lead, adding the phrase "under God" to the previously secular Pledge of Allegiance. A similar phrase, "In God We Trust," was added to a postage stamp for the first time in 1954 and then to paper money the next year; in 1956, it became the nation's first official motto. During the Eisenhower

Oklahoma lingered so long as a territory because of who lived there. The familiar image of territories as "empty" lands awaiting enough inhabitants to sustain a government is badly misleading. The reason Congress held territories back from statehood wasn't that no one lived in them but because the wrong people did.

During the reign of President Donald Trump, who pandered to white nationalists and promised to protect monuments to the Confederacy, the GOP reverted to its earlier form with a vengeance. Due to the success of the Southern Strategy, Republicans are now unrecognizable as the party of Lincoln.

With a wide-angle lens, this book traces the political, economic, racial, and sexual divisions in modern America, but also the cultural and technological changes that confronted and contorted the country along the way. Following these fault lines, in both senses of the term, we examine the history of our divided America.

This bright line soon blurred. Republicans, who sent nearly two dozen African Americans to Congress in the late nineteenth century, relaxed their commitment to racial equality as the twentieth century began. Southern Democrats still led the way in entrenching disfranchisement and discrimination, but northern Republicans now offered tacit acceptance or explicit approval.

By the early decades of the twentieth century, Republicans and Democrats each had made peace with white supremacy. Notably, when the Klan revived in the 1920s, the second version found supporters in both parties: Democrats in the South, Republicans in the Midwest.

history that seeks to exalt a nation's strengths without examining its shortcomings, that values feeling good over thinking hard, that embraces simplistic celebration over complex understanding, isn't history; it's propaganda.

As Sarah Maza has echoed in her own work, "Trying to fit a scenario from the past onto one in the present can be disastrous: 'We will liberate Iraq, as we did Europe!' 'Don't go for a diplomatic solution—remember Munich!'"19

Historic fascists generally argued that women's primary function was domestic and reproductive. National-populists

Silence is unacceptable in the face of injustice, and being neutral is being a coward and an accomplice to the evil sides of our history.

There comes a time in the history of nations when their peoples must become fully reconciled to their past if they are to go forward with confidence to embrace their future.

I don't tie in the Palestinian history to my father's. Their story is about nationalism and independence and not about genocide or murdering a nation.

Native Americans considered the grizzly another kind of human being, a creature from the mythic past, a survivor from the dawn of creation.

From the beginning, American California was caught in a paradox of reverent awe and exploitative use.

By 1870, San Francisco, with a population of 149,473, was the tenth largest city in the United States, a remarkable development for a city that did not formally exist in 1846.

All told, some $594 million in ingots—the equivalent of $10 billion in 2001 dollars—would over the course of the next decade be leaving the goldfields of California for the eastern United States.

Incorporated in June 1861, the Central Pacific Railroad of California was the result of conversations that had begun a year and a half earlier between Judah and four Sacramento businessmen: Collis P. Huntington and his partner Mark Hopkins (hardware), Leland Stanford (groceries), and Charles Crocker (dry goods).

the murder rate in the mines was horrendous—an annual rate of 506.6 homicides per 100,000 population in Sonora, for example, in 1850–51, which is fifty times the national homicide rate of 1999.

San Francisco averaged a homicide rate of 49 per 100,000 between 1849 and 1856, six times the 1997 homicide rate

From all accounts, it seems the faithful opposition is reduced to Gideon's 300. The day has arrived for Christians to engage the battle...From now on, true Christians will engage the battle of ideas in academy. The time for giving up ground is over. Now we must fight. We must engage the [B]iblical worldview vigorously in the world of great literature. The greatests wars ever fought in history are not those fought by sword or artillery. The greatest battles are engaged in the realm of ideas

The 'Irish Question' has dogged English politics for four hundred years and will continue to measure out its irresolution in blood and human lives until there is peace in Ireland.

Religion fared badly in so much of the history he wrote about, and yet he was constantly surprised by how much solace he gained from places of worship. It wasn't redemptive, nothing to do with conscience—more the strange sense of meaningful emptiness he found in these places, a quality that allowed him to disappear effortlessly.

HISTORIANS HAVE established that wine production in the Peloponnese region began over 7,000 years ago.

He carries in his eyes a pearl; from the ends of days and from the winds he takes a spark; and from his hand, from the islands of rain a mountain, and creates dawn. I know him—he carries in his eyes the prophecy of the seas. He named me history and the poem that purifies a place. I know him—he named me flood.