Quotes About History

Other lakes get similar treatment. According to Michigan markers, whites discovered Lake Michigan, Lake St. Clair, and Lake Superior. Lake Erie gets a more complex marker: "Named for the Erie Indians, this was the last of the Great Lakes discovered by white men..." Actually, none of them was discovered by white men, but this marker at least admits that Native Americans existed and implies they knew of Lake Erie.

The authors make no connection between the failure of the United States to guarantee black civil rights in 1877 and the need for a civil rights movement a century later. Nothing ever causes anything. Things just happen.

When you see a roadside marker, take in what it tells but also ask, how might this be wrong? One giveaway is the use of qualifying phrases introducing statements of fact, as in: "According to tradition..." or "According to the legislature..." Visitors can count on the rest of such sentences to be unsubstantiated.

Monuments look static - carved in stone and all - but their meanings change as the present changes and as people enact new rituals at them.

The actual cabin fell into disrepair probably before Lincoln became president. According to research by D. T. Pitcaithley, the new cabin, a hoax built in 1894, was leased to two amusement park owners, went to Coney Island, where it got commingled with the birthplace cabin of Jefferson Davis (another hoax), and was finally shrunk to fit inside a marble pantheon in Kentucky, where, reassembled, it still stands.

African Americans helped build Hoover Dam but had to commute from Las Vegas to do it, while white workers and their families lived in Boulder City, a sundown town built just for them. African Americans helped build Kentucky Dam, but after they finished, their housing—"Negro Village"—was razed, they were booted out, and Marshall County, Kentucky, resumed being a sundown county.

We must not forget this—not to wallow in our wrongdoing, but to understand and to learn, that we might not wreak harm again. We must temper our national pride with critical self-knowledge

Recovering the memory of the increasing oppression of African Americans during the first half of the twentieth century can deepen our understanding of the role racism has played in our society and continues to play today.

Surely, in history, "truth should be held sacred, at whatever cost.

The opposite of racism is antiracism, of course, or what we might call racial idealism or equalitarianism, and it is still not clear whether it will prevail. In this struggle, our history textbooks offer little help. Just as they underplay white racism, they also neglect racial idealism. In doing so, they deprive students of potential role models to call upon as they try to bridge the new fault lines that will spread out in the future from the great rift in our past.

In June 1906, the city council of Santa Ana, California, passed a resolution that called for the fire department to burn each and every one of the said buildings known as Chinatown; on June 26 a crowd of more than a thousand watched it burn.

From Myakka City, Florida, to Kennewick, Washington, the nation is dotted with thousands of all-white towns that are (or were until recently) all white on purpose.

Understanding our past is central to our ability to understand ourselves and the world around us.

Those few textbooks that do discuss Wilson's racism and other shortcomings have to battle uphill, for they struggle against the archetypal Woodrow Wilson commemorated in so many history museums, public television documentaries, and historical novels.

Bartolomé de Las Casas

Making the present seem inevitable robs history of all its life and much of its meaning.

We do not like to think of the United States as a police state, a nation like East Germany that people had to escape from, but the slaveholding states were just that.

No sensible Indian person," wrote George P. Horse Capture, "can celebrate the arrival of Columbus."90 Cherishing Columbus is a characteristic of white history, not American history.

For that matter, even if the owners and workers in a historic site had not included a president, most visitors would want to hear about the important events in their lives, not just about their furniture.

How people think about the past is an important part of their consciousness.

neither morality nor immorality can simply be conferred upon us by history. 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.

Any telling of history requires choices as to what is included and what is left out and is therefore by definition an interpretation.

In the 1920s, Florida and other Southern states passed laws requiring "Securing a Correct History of the U.S., Including a True and Correct History of the Confederacy.

For our first seventy years as a nation, then, slavery made our foreign policy more sympathetic with imperialism than with self-determination