Quotes About History

Indian history is the antidote to the pious ethnocentrism of American exceptionalism, the notion that European Americans are God's chosen people. Indian history reveals that the United States and its predecessor British colonies have wrought great harm in the world. We must not forget this—not to wallow in our wrongdoing, but to understand and to learn, that we might not wreak harm again.

Old myths never die—they just become embedded in the textbooks. —THOMAS BAILEY

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.

History, despite its wrenching pain, Cannot be unlived, and if faced With courage, need not be lived again. —MAYA ANGELOU

On Ho Chi Minh's desk in Hanoi on the day he died lay a biography of John Brown.

Everyone named in our history made a positive contribution (except John Brown, as the next chapter shows). Or as Frances FitzGerald put it when she analyzed textbooks in 1979, "In all history, there is no known case of anyone's creating a problem for anyone else.

To summarize, waves of ethnic cleansing swept across the United States between about 1890 and 1940, leaving thousands of sundown towns in their wake. Thousands of sundown suburbs formed even later, some as late as the 1960s. As recently as the 1970s, elite suburbs like Edina, Minnesota, would openly turn away Jewish and black would-be home buyers. Some towns and suburbs were still sundown when this book went to press in 2005.

If textbooks recognized Lincoln's racism, students would learn that racism not only affects Ku Klux Klan extremists but has been normal throughout our history. And as they watched Lincoln struggle with himself to apply America's democratic principles across the color line, students would see how ideas can develop and a person can grow.

Rethinking Our Past: Recognizing Facts, Fiction, and Lies in American History Social Science in the Courtroom

Since the alternatives to war remain roads largely not taken in the United States, however, they are tricky subjects for historians. As Edward Carr notes, History is, by and large, a record of what people did, not what people failed to do. On the other hand, making the present seem inevitable robs history of all its life and much of its meaning. History is contingent on the actions of people.

Our culture teaches us to locate overt racism long ago (in the nineteenth century) or far away (in the South) or to marginalize it as the work of a few crazed deviants who carried out their violent works under cover of darkness.

Indeed, history is the only field in which the more courses students take, the stupider they become.

Students exit history textbooks without having developed the ability to think coherently about social life. Even

Merely being part of the United States, without regard to our own acts and ideas, does not make us moral or immoral beings. History is more complicated than that.

history textbooks need to disabuse students of the flat-earth myth.

After the Fact, a book for college history majors in which they emphasize that history is not a set of facts but a series of arguments, issues, and controversies.

In 1920, Warren G. Harding ran his famous "front porch campaign" from his family home in Marion, Ohio; a few months before, Marion was the scene of an ethnic cleansing as whites drove out virtually every African American. According to Harding scholar Phillip Payne, "As a consequence, Marion is an overwhelming[ly] white town to this date [2002].

One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over.

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.

White mobs killed African Americans across the United States. Some of these events, like the 1919 Chicago riot, are well-known. Others, such as the 1921 riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which whites dropped dynamite from airplanes onto a black ghetto, killing more than seventy-five people and destroying more than eleven hundred homes, have completely vanished from our history books.

We cannot erase what we have done, and to alter our future behavior may not be in our interest. To change our attitude is easier.

Garrett County is hardly colder than Detroit -- hardly colder in 2002, for that matter, when I had the conversation, than it had been in 1890, when it had 185 African Americans. The fact that the very next county to the east had more than 1,000 African Americans, while Garrett County had at most one black household, is a dead giveaway. Such abrupt disparities can only result from different racial policies, not from factors such as climate.

This is part of a pattern in our textbooks: anything bad in America history happened anonymously.

Many sundown towns had not a single black household as late as the 2000 census, and some still openly exclude to this day.