Quotes About History

I began to sense that a big part of our problem is simple ignorance of what the oldest cultures have to teach.

Suddenly, it seems ridiculous that we just came from a city airport named for Columbus, a terrible navigator who insisted to his dying day that he was in India—which is why people here are called Indians. As the Native women in Houston said, "It could have been worse—he could have thought he was in Turkey.

It was a constitutional convention for the female half of the country. After all, we had been excluded from the first one.

Clearly, Columbus never "discovered" America, in either sense of that word. The people who knew it were already here.

It seems more hopeful to talk about what came before patriarchy--and could show us a way beyond it.

They knew that in the 1970s the Indian Health Service of the U.S. government admitted that thousands of Native women had been sterilized without their informed consent. Some called it a long-term strategy for taking over Indian lands, and others said it was the same racism that had sterilized black women in the South.

This vertical history feels more intimate and sensory than written history. It's been reaching out all along, I just wasn't paying attention.

I learned that the first stewardesses had been registered nurses hired to make passengers feel safe at a time when flying was new, airsickness was frequent, and passengers were fearful.

In my own college life, I got through four years as a government major without learning that women were not just "given" the vote, that the real number of slave rebellions was suppressed because rebelling was contagious, or that the model for the U.S. Constitution was not ancient Greece but the Iroquois Confederacy.

It had taken three murders - Martin Luther King, Jr., and two Kennedys - to leave the country with this choice between Nixon and Hubert Humphrey.

What Julia Ward Howe had in mind in 1870 when she invented Mother's Day for Peace was a day on which we oppose war and advance peace.

I remember with gratitude the banner carried by some very old and bawdy women who led the parade while I was a student: hardly a man is now alive, who remembers the girls of '95.)

In Western mythology, she might be compared to Medusa, the serpent-haired Greek goddess whose name means Knowing Woman or Protectress. She once was all-powerful—until patriarchy came along in the form of a mythic young man who chopped off her head. He was told to do this by Athena, who sprang full-blown from the mind of her father, Zeus—a goddess thought up by patriarchy and therefore motherless. There is history in what is dismissed as prehistory In

As in history, a potentially powerful majority was being divided by an entrenched powerful few.

Though patriarchal cultures and religions have made hierarchy seem inevitable, human for 95 percent of history have been more likely to see the circle as our paradigm.

Thanks to President Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act, Cherokee land was left to white farmers who used it to grow cotton with slave labor and to mine gold.

Thinking about our schooling in different decades and parts of the country, all three of us in that kitchen discover that we were taught more about ancient Greece and Rome than about the history of the land we live on. We learned about the pyramid builders of Egypt but not the pyramid builders of the Mississippi River.

People long to go backward in their imagination as well as forward. We don't wish simply to exist forever in some future; we wish to have existed in some distant past.

My thinking at that time was determined by a kind of wilfully repressed pleasure[Freude] in Freud ,and I wanted to be as artistically direct as plumber illustrating the history of art with a spanner.

As Littlewood said to me once [of the ancient Greeks], they are not clever school boys or 'scholarship candidates,' but 'Fellows of another college.

It was as if, from 1967 on, for several years, two different tribes of Americans experienced the same outward events but experienced them as two quite different realities.

The deepest, the only theme of human history, compared to which all others are of subordinate importance, is the conflict of skepticism with faith.

I call the Classical what is healthy and the Romantic what is sick. - Goethe in 1829

Patriotism ruins history.