Quotes About History

The Children's Blizzard. Because at least one hundred of the people who died were schoolchildren

Some of the world's richest and most famous people flew on the Graf Zeppelin and the Hindenburg,

Was the Chicago Fire the deadliest in U.S. history? The Great Chicago Fire is remembered because it destroyed a four-mile swath of one of America's most important cities. But it was not the deadliest fire. Amazingly the deadliest fire in U.S. history happened the very same day as the Great Chicago Fire, about 250 miles to the north, in Peshtigo, Wisconsin.

Old books exert a strange fascination for me -- their smell, their feel, their history; wondering who might have owned them, how they lived, what they felt.

Whether I like it or not, most of my images of what various historical periods feel, smell, or sound like were acquired well before I set foot in any history class. They came from Margaret Mitchell, from Anya Seton, from M.M. Kaye, and a host of other authors, in their crackly plastic library bindings. Whether historians acknowledge it or not, scholarly history's illegitimate cousin, the historical novel, plays a profound role in shaping widely held conceptions of historical realities.

Know ye yet the edda? Know ye yet it all?

On August 11, 1520, Magellan carried out the sentence he had proclaimed for his nemesis, Juan de Cartagena

Fernão de Magalhães, or Ferdinand Magellan. According to most accounts, he was born in 1480, in the remote mountain parish of Sabrosa, the seat of the family homestead. He spent his childhood in northwestern Portugal, within sight of the pounding surf of the Atlantic.

With their maneuverable sails and impressive seaworthiness, caravels became the vessels of choice for exploration.

The gallows that Magellan had erected still cast a shadow over a hill

mass, only Magellan's cousin, Álvaro de Mesquita, the recently appointed captain of San Antonio, came aboard Trinidad

under the command of the two Portuguese commanders.

Yet his salary was considerably more than Magellan's, the highest of any in the fleet:

The fleet would be called the Armada de Molucca, after the Indonesian name for the Spice Islands. The ships were mostly black—pitch black.

The privileged pages maintained the sixteen Venetian sand clocks—or ampolletas—carried by Magellan's ships.

Basically a large hourglass, the sand clock had been in use since Egyptian times;

Prince Henry sent no less than fourteen expeditions to Cape Bojador within twelve years

Years before Magellan arrived at the Río de la Plata, both Spanish and Portuguese ships had searched for the strait at this very point.

Thus Magellan's flagship, Trinidad, weighed 100 tons; San Antonio, which carried many of the provisions, weighed 120 tons;

In 1513, only six years before Magellan undertook his circumnavigation, Juan Ponce de León set out to find the Fountain of Youth.

Concepción 90 tons, Victoria 85 tons;

According to tradition, the fountain was located on the island of Bimini, in the Bahamas.

Spain's top naval officer, the Marquis of Santa Cruz commenced a steep decline

Millions of years ago, two tectonic plates merged and created a unique landscape