Quotes About History

Not too much call for knowing the American gene spread on the snowball.

I sell Damascus steel, folded and intricate, dug up from the earth, practically useless, desirable only to lovers of the arcane, the beautiful, the old. No

The history of every place is the history of the people inside it and the people outside it. The history of every person is the history of the love they've known and the hate they've grown.

Chicago at the time owned a lake the size of a sea, several advertising firms, at least six tribes of marauding criminals, healthy herds of sailors grazing free, the first Ferris wheel in all the world, and more wind than it could care for.

Thomas did not pay much attention to his lessons that day. It hardly mattered as Mrs. Wilkinson only seemed interested in how to make an "A" and what colour was magenta and how to add one and one together. Thomas knew all that. Only that morning he'd been reading a book full of big violent illustrations of the great battles of Britain, with quite a lot of magenta in it.

How can you know things have changed, Julian, if you don't know how things were?

History so often is. Especially when it's not history but is now.

an unbroken line of unrelated people

Humans have historically used the arts in integrative ways, particularly within the contexts of enactment, ceremony, performance, and ritual.

There were three major triggers that led to the end of WWI: (1) The Russian Revolution (2) Americans entering the war in 1917 (3) The failure of Germany's Spring Offensive

It is indeed the truth of the traumatic experience that forms the center of its psychopathology; it is not a pathology of falsehood or displacement of meaning, but of history itself" (p. 5)

The traumatized, we might say, carry an impossible history within them. Or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess (and thus which possesses them).

What worried him most was something Dietrich had mentioned observing during his visit to America—the way Americans treated Negroes. Not so different in some ways than German citizens treated Jews at the beginning. If Americans treat our citizens in such a way, will they step up to the plate to protect their own or the world's Jews? He wasn't sure.

You can push all that past aside if you want to, but until you understand where people around here came from and why they think the way they do, you won't be able to help them get beyond it. You can't just whisk a magic wand and make the past disappear or rewrite it because you don't like it. You'll never change the present if you do that. You have to learn from what's gone on and work hard if you want to make the future better.

Un nombre bastante anticuado. Nos preguntábamos de dónde lo habrías sacado. Casi me atraganto con la comida.

It was a combination of old magic and a woman's wisdom with God's herbs, and most of it is lost. People then didn't write their wisdom down. They relied on the seanachai to tell the story aloud

doctoral candidate in the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University, joined this project in the Fall of 2007. Collaboration (especially with so many participants) is an enormous

stability. It is often noted that, of all existing institutions in the West, higher education is one of most enduring. Oxford University, the longest continuously running university in the English-speaking world, was founded in the twelfth century.4

like the Catholic Church, universities today bear a striking structural resemblance to what they were

Given this history, it is certainly hard to fathom something as dispersed, decentralized, and virtual as the Internet being a learning institution in any way comparable to, say, Oxford. We know, given these long histories, what a learning institution is-or we think we do. But what happens when, rivaling formal educational systems, there are also many

Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it's more than a chat about race. It's ontological. It's like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality. Except it's even trickier than that. Because the person has all of Western history, politics, literature, and mass culture on their side, proving that you don't exist.

In many Asian American novels, writers set trauma in a distant mother country or within an insular Asian family to ensure that their pain is not a reproof against American imperial geopolitics or domestic racism; the outlying forces that cause their pain—Asian Patriarchal Fathers, White People Back Then—are remote enough to allow everyone, including the reader, off the hook.

If the indebted Asian immigrant thinks they owe their life to America, the child thinks they owe their livelihood to their parents for their suffering. The indebted Asian American is therefore the ideal neoliberal subject. I accept that the burden of history is solely on my shoulders; that it's up to me to earn back reparations for the losses my parents incurred, and to do so, I must, without complaint, prove myself in the workforce.

When Kochiyama found a waitressing job in New York, her black coworkers were the first to educate her about America's racist history. Finally, Kochiyama had a vocabulary, a historical context. What had happened to her wasn't a nightmarish aberration but the norm.