Quotes About History

America has never been easy, and is not easy to-day. Americans have always been at a certain tension. Their liberty is a thing of sheer will, sheer tension: a liberty of THOU SHALT NOT.

Can England die? And what if England dies?

Well, that is the seductive charm of history; she convinces one that a partial view is the total view and drives the passionate to act. Here lies, precisely, the liberatory potential of history. One who waits for the total view will never act nor even take a plunge into history.

Libraries and museums owe their richest collections to people who cannot bear to think that their names might perish from the memory of the race.

called Forest Park—and it was a forest, probably not much different in appearance from what it was when Columbus discovered America. I frequently walked in this park with Rex, my little Boston bulldog. He was a friendly, harmless little hound; and since we rarely

One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect men and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth.

Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?

XVII. THE PROPAGANDA OF HISTORY How the facts of American history have in the last half century have been falsified because the nation was ashamed. The South was ashamed because it fought to perpetuate human slavery. The North was ashamed because it had to call in the black men to save the Union, abolish slavery and establish democracy.

What rent do you pay here? I inquired. I don't know,—what is it, Sam? All we make, answered Sam. It is a depressing place,—bare, unshaded, with no charm of past association, only a memory of forced human toil,—now, then, and before the war. They are not happy, these black men whom we meet throughout this region. There is little of the joyous abandon and playfulness which we are wont to associate with the plantation Negro.

Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face. Through history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.

It is the aim of this essay to study the period of history from 1861 to 1872 so far as it relates to the American Negro.

Our histories tend to discuss American slavery so impartially, that in the end nobody seems to have done wrong and everybody was right. Slavery appears to have thrust upon unwilling helpless America, while the South was blameless in becoming its center...One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over.

Curious it was, too, how this deeper question ever forced itself to the surface despite effort and disclaimer. No sooner had Northern armies touched Southern soil than this old question, newly guised, sprang from the earth,—What shall be done with Negroes?

It is fair to say that the Negro carpetbag governments established the public schools of the south. Although recent researches have shown many germs of a public school system in the south before the war, there can be no reasonable doubt that common school instruction in the south, in the modern sense of the term, was founded by the Freedmen's Bureau and missionary societies, and that the state public school system was formed mainly by Negro Reconstruction governments.

For this much all men know: despite compromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not free.

The opposition to Negro education in the South was at first bitter, and showed itself in ashes, insult, and blood; for the South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. And the South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent.

no approximately correct history of civilization can ever be written which does not throw out in bold relief, as one of the great landmarks of political and social progress, the organization and administration of the Freedmen's Bureau.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.

I. THE BLACK WORKER How black men, coming to America in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteen and nineteenth centuries, became a central thread in the history of the United States, at once a challenge to its democracy and always an important part of its economic history and social development.

The Negro worked as farmhand and peasant proprietor, as laborer, artisan, and inventor and as servant in the house, and without him, America as we know it would have been impossible.

Merely a concrete test of the underlying principles of the great republic is the Negro Problem, and the spiritual striving of the freedmen's sons is the travail of souls whose burden is almost beyond the measure of their strength, but who bear it in the name of an historic race, in the name of this the land of their fathers' fathers, and in the name of human opportunity.

Then the long-headed man with care-chiselled face who sat in the White House saw the inevitable, and emancipated the slaves of rebels on New Year's, 1863.

The time has not yet come for a complete history of the Negro peoples. Archæological