Quotes About History

In 1892, mine owner L. L. Nunn had hired the electrical wizard Nikola Tesla to build the world's first alternating-current power

Bimini Road in the waters off the Bahamas.

CONSTRUCTION ON SAN QUENTIN PRISON BEGAN auspiciously on Bastille Day, July 14, 1852.

Why it was later named after a notorious inmate

Is this a good time to raise the question of seat belts? asked Giordino with his feet raised and wedged against the dashboard of the L-29 Cord town car. Pitt shook his head. Not optional equipment in 1930.

JANUARY 10, 1906 BISBEE, ARIZONA

past the cemetery outside the town of Rhyolite, Nevada.

Giordino looked at Pitt like he was crazy, then followed his gaze up the ravine. Overhead was a dark mass of rock buried beneath a thin layer of ice. Surveying the hillside, Giordino suddenly felt his jaw drop. It wasn't a mound of rock at all, he realized with astonishment. Above them, embedded in the ice, the men found themselves staring at the wooden black hull of a nineteenth-century sailing ship. 80 THE EREBUS STOOD LIKE A FORGOTTEN RELIC OF a bygone era.

She's in remarkably good shape for sitting underwater for almost fifty years

stranded Napoleon in Egypt, which

We compromised on my withdrawal. I didn't. We British don't withdraw from Ireland.

Shawnees moved so often and dispersed so widely that they sometimes seemed like a people without a homeland of their own.

As late as 1701, a Bordeaux ship's captain was able to persuade his employers that he had lost his cargo off Newfoundland to a fire-breathing dragon looming out of the deep.

the national soccer team won the World Cup in 1930 and

A nation is bound not only by the real past, but the stories it tells itself: by what it remembers, and what it forgets.

Once, at the dreaming dawn of history -- before the world was categorized and regulated by mortal minds, before solid boundaries formed between the mortal world and any other -- fairies roamed freely among men, and the two races knew each other well. Yet the knowing was never straightforward, and the adventures that mortals and fairies had together were fraught with uncertainty, for fairies and humans were alien to each other.

Se houve um momento fatal no destino da Rota da Seda, talvez não tenha sido a tomada de Constantinopla, nem o enclausuramento da China pelos Ming, nem o desembarque de Colombo, mas sim o dia, algures no século X, em que um chinês desconhecido descobriu a bússola marítima.

Enquanto baluarte, a Muralha não fazia sentido. Os hunos, os mongóis e os manchus transpuseram-na quase sem impedimento. (…) Talvez, de uma forma não intencional, ela constituísse menos uma defesa física do que uma monstruosa delimitação. Separava a civilização da barbárie, a luz das trevas.

Em Samarcanda, dois séculos antes da invenção do telescópio, Ulug Beg registava a trajetória de mil e dezoito estrelas e recalculava o ano estelar com uma diferença de segundos em relação aos resultados obtidos atualmente pela eletrónica.

Há muito que os comissários do gulag se tinham aposentado, com medalhas e pensões. Nem um único comparecera perante a justiça. A Rússia voltara as costas ao passado. Como podia eu entender? Desde o Holocausto, o meu mundo fizera da memória um dever. A Rússia, tal como a China, optara pelo esquecimento. Era assim que as pessoas sobreviviam, dizia o escritor Shamalov. Uma nação não se construía sobre a verdade.

Most Americans know the Dutch founded what is now Greater New York City. Few realize that their influence is largely the reason New York is New York, the most vibrant and powerful city on the continent, and one with a culture and identity unlike that of anyplace else in the United States.

A state is a sovereign political entity like the United Kingdom, Kenya, Panama, or New Zealand, eligible for membership in the United Nations and inclusion on the maps produced by Rand McNally or the National Geographic Society. A nation is a group of people who share—or believe they share—a common culture, ethnic origin, language, historical experience, artifacts, and symbols.

By the end of his presidency—and the sixteen-year run of Dixie dominance in Washington—income inequality and the concentration of wealth in the federation had reached the highest levels in its history, exceeding even the Gilded Age and Great Depression. In 2007 the richest tenth of Americans accounted for half of all income, while the richest 1 percent had seen their share nearly triple since 1994.8

You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.