Quotes About History

One crisis, in Cuba, mounted quickly after Fidel Castro staged a successful revolution against a corrupt pro-American dictatorship and triumphantly took power in January 1959. Castro at first seemed heroic to many Americans. When he came to the United States in April, he was warmly received and spent three hours talking with Vice-President Nixon. But relations soon cooled. Castro executed opponents and confiscated foreign investments, including $1 billion held by Americans.

Jackie added in White's article, read by millions, that the Kennedy administration had been Camelot, a magic moment in American history, when gallant men danced with beautiful women, when great deeds were done, when artists, writers, and poets met at the White House and the barbarians beyond the walls were held back. But it will never be that way again. . . . There'll never be another Camelot again.76

Nothing did more during these years to excite such emotions than the successful launching by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957 of Sputnik, the world's first orbiting satellite. Sputnik was small—about 184 pounds and the size of a beach ball.

Civilization is knowledge, even more than it is urbanization, for you cannot have the latter without the former. Everything builds on everything else. And the knowledge of civilization is kept in repositories known as...LIBRARIES, and if books burn, civilization burns with them.

Thinking of the hour as a consistent measure was not a familiar concept for most people, while the minute and second didn't exist as common units. (The division of the hour into 60 minutes and the minute into 60 seconds comes from the Babylonians, who used a base-60, or sexagecimal, system of counting for their astronomy. The ancient Greeks later adopted this and divided circular astronomical maps into 360 divisions, which were later transposed on to clock faces.)

Textbooks in American history stand in sharp contrast to other teaching materials. Why are history textbooks so bad? Nationalism is one of the culprits. Textbooks are often muddled by the conflicting desires to promote inquiry and to indoctrinate blind patriotism. "Take a look in your history book, and you'll see why we should be proud" goes an anthem often sung by high school glee clubs. But we need not even look inside.

what a community erects on its historical landscape not only sums up its view of the past but also influences its possible futures.

History through red eyes offers our children a deeper understanding than comes from encountering the past as a story of inevitable triumph by the good guys.

Whether one deems our present society wondrous or awful or both, history reveals how we arrived at this point. Understanding our past is central to our ability to understand ourselves and the world around us. We need to know our history, and according to sociologist C. Wright Mills, we know we do.8

As a symbol of the new United States, Americans chose the eagle clutching a bundle of arrows. They knew that both the eagle and the arrows were symbols of the Iroquois League. Although one arrow is easily broken, no one can break six (or thirteen) at once. John

For that matter an individual with the money (between $500 and $2,000) and a place to put it can erect a historical marker.

Not understanding their past renders many Americans incapable of thinking effectively about our present and future.

At this point the judge took over the questioning. Didn't lynchings happen in Mississippi? he asked. Yes, admitted the rating committee member, but it was all so long ago, why dwell on it now? It is a history book, isn't it? asked the judge.

Very few adults today realize that our society has been slave much longer than it has been free.

What You Can Do About Sundown Towns: The Three-Step Program in Action To help sundown towns transcend their pasts and end second-generation sundown town issues, I suggest a "Three-Step Program": •?Admit it: "We did this." •?Apologize: "It was wrong, and we apologize." •?Renounce: "And we don't do it anymore.

Not only do textbooks fail to blame the federal government for its opposition to the civil rights movement, many actually credit the government, almost single-handedly, for the advances made during the period.

Surely the desired end product of high school U.S. history courses is graduates who can think clearly, distinguish evidence from opinion, and separate truth from what comedian Stephen Colbert famously called "truthiness.

If members of the elite come to think that their privilege was historically justified and earned, it will be hard to persuade them to yield opportunity to others.

No book can convey the depths of the black experience without including material from the oppressed group. Yet not one textbook in my original sample let African Americans speak for themselves.

When textbooks make racism invisible in American history, they obstruct our already poor ability to see it in the present.

On his first voyage, Columbus kidnapped some ten to twenty-five American Indians and took them back with him to Spain.55 Only seven or eight arrived alive, but along with the parrots, gold trinkets, and other exotica, they caused quite a stir in Seville. Ferdinand and Isabella provided Columbus with seventeen ships, twelve hundred to fifteen hundred men, cannons, crossbows, guns, cavalry, and attack dogs for a second voyage.

After Col. Henry Bouquet defeated the Ohio Indians at Bushy Run in 1763, he demanded the release of all white captives. Most of them, especially the children, had to be "bound hand and foot" and forcibly returned to white society. Meanwhile, the Native prisoners "went back to their defeated relations with great signs of joy," in the words of the anthropologist Frederick Turner (in Beyond Geography, 245). Turner rightly calls these scenes "infamous and embarrassing.

Our goal must be to help students uncover the past rather than cover it. Instead of "teaching the book," teachers must develop a list of 30–50 topics they want to teach in their U.S. history course. Every topic should excite or at least interest them. What meaning might it have to students' lives?

The duty of the historian," Gordon Craig has reminded us, "is to restore to the past the options it once had." Craig also pointed out that this is an appropriate way to teach history and to make it memorable.