Quotes About History

The librarian sighs. How can you know, she says, if no one teaches you, and no one ever talks about it, and all the books about it are gone?

He enjoys the surprise on people's faces when he tells them he's a professor of American history. "Well, I am American," he says when people blink, a barb of defensiveness in his tone. Someone

We don't burn our books, she says. We pulp them. Much more civilized, right? Mash them up, recycle them into toilet paper. Those books wiped someone's rear end a long time ago. Oh, says Bird. So that's what happened to his mother's books. All those words

And some people chide her for coming too late. One older woman—a Choctaw woman, whose granddaughter had been taken—looked at Margaret for a long time with weary eyes, then clicked her teeth. You think this is something new? She shook her head.

How could you blame Mia's parents for not understanding? They had been born in the wartime years; they'd been raised by parents who'd come of age in the Depression, who threw nothing out, not even moldy food. They were old enough to remember when rags became felt for the war effort, when cans and scrap metal could become bullets and cans of grease explosives. Practicality was baked into their bones. They wasted nothing, especially time.

database at Ellis Island

PACT: Preserving American Culture and Traditions.

She knew that he was telling the truth, that this had been the truth for a long, long time.

Laura Briggs's Taking Children: A History of American Terror gives an invaluable overview.

While the Irish and the Germans and the Swedes crowded onto steamship decks, waving as the pale green torch of the Statue of Liberty came into view, the coolies had to find other means to reach the land where all men were created equal.

Writings on McCarthyism, including Naming Names, by Victor S. Navasky, and The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents, by Ellen Schrecker and Phillip Deery, provided a chilling glimpse into how all-pervasive fear can become; Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime, by Geoffrey R. Stone, cataloged dozens of historical examples with eerie resonances to our current times; and books such as Ronald C. Rosbottom's When Paris Went Dark: The City

of Light Under German Occupation, 1940–1944

There was a long history of children taken, the pretexts different but the reasons the same.

Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny was

Behind them, empty bookshelves. Bird has never seen books on them, but there they stand, fossils of a long-gone era.

Now we're starting to be aware of the problems with not "seeing race": ignoring race means ignoring longstanding problems and history, as well as ignoring important aspects of a person's identity.

They probably teach you that most plantation owners were kind to their slaves and that Columbus discovered America, don't they?

Tarih yaz?c?l??? özgürle?tirmiyorsa zulme hizmet ediyordur

Sömürgecili?in mezar kaz?c?s? olarak ça??m?z?n iki büyük ideolojisi el ele vermi?tir: milliyetçilik ve sosyalizm.

Rest in peace. The mistake shall not be repeated.

happy is the nation without a history

They were the good old days. Don't give up hope in the bad new days, which will become the good old days. We appreciate Kennedy because he was killed; Martin Luther King was a great man. If you'd meet Naropa or Tilopa on the spot you'd be pissed off. History is very deceptive, reality is more important. There is a piece of philosophy for you.

Sir Isaac Newton said, "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Smart guys like Isaac know that there is much to be learned from those who came before us. Be like Isaac.

I think that to a very great extent we are partners with the divine in this enterprise called history. That is an ongoing relationship, and there is absolutely no guarantee that things will automatically work out to our best advantage.