Quotes About History

We want to transcend our history without actually confronting it. We cannot address the place we find ourselves because we will not acknowledge the road that brought us here.

Anyone intent on moral clarity might want to find another book and, in fact, might not want to go anywhere near the enduring chasm of race in the United States.

We must look at the facts squarely, not to flounder in a bitter nostalgia of pain but to redeem a democratic promise rooted in the living ingredients of our own history.

We are runaway slaves from our own past, and only by turning to face the hounds can we find our freedom beyond them.

What is a nation?

We see a seventeenth-century goblet and think: That is what a seventeenth-century goblet looks like, and isn't it remarkably like/unlike (choose one) goblets today? We tend not to think: What is a goblet doing there? Who made it? Where did it come from? Why did the artist choose to include it instead of something else, a teacup, say, or a glass jar?

Even though Europe and China sustained roughly similar populations (about 120 million people in 1600) and were spread over roughly the same area (10 million square kilometres), Europe remained a patchwork of small sovereignties whereas China found itself over and over again reunified as a single state.

Zhang was scathing toward authors who write history by simply repeating ancient facts and dismissing recent developments. Such people perpetuate ignorance rather than produce knowledge.

What should have been shattering news—a Klansman dictating orders to elected officials and leaders of the dominant political party—barely caused a stir.

With the abolition of slavery, Black people were no longer counted as three-fifths but as a full person in the census. Ultimately, that gave twenty-five additional congressional seats to a one-party South that violently suppressed the vote of those newly recognized people. In 1880, 50 percent of Black men in the former Confederacy voted. By 1920, less than 1 percent exercised this fundamental right.

Napoleon rarely marched off to battle without hundreds of cases of Moët & Chandon in tow. "I drink champagne when I win," he said, "and I drink champagne when I lose.

Indiana was the most Southern of Northern states—North Dixie

As to Baker, that name should be forgotten," Winthrop wrote in The Canoe and the Saddle. "Mountains should not be insulted by being named after undistinguished bipeds.…

Of all the countries in the world, we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people barbaric or civilized," Bennett said in a speech at the start of the dust storms. What was happening, he said, was "sinister," a symptom of "our stupendous ignorance.

Two of the biggest volcanoes in the Northwest, Hood and Rainier, are named for wartime enemies of America.

Of all the countries in the world, we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people barbaric or civilized

The tribes may have been numerous, but the overall population was plummeting. When the results of the 1900 census were published, the government counted only 237,000 Indians in a country of 76 million people. This was the lowest number ever, scholars and Indian authorities said, down from perhaps as many as 10 million at the time of white contact in 1492.

The governor of Georgia, Clifford Walker, told a Klan rally in 1924 that the United States should "build a wall of steel, a wall as high as heaven" against immigrants.

Sealth died in 1866, one year after the city which bore his name passed an ordinance to ban Indians from town.

The one-way plow would later be cursed as the tool that destroyed the plains because of its efficiency at ripping up grass.

Americans had become a force of awful geology, changing the face of the earth more than "the combined activities of volcanoes, earthquakes, tidal waves, tornadoes and all the excavations of mankind since the beginning of history.

Americans are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of the land," said the new president, Herbert Hoover, who took office in 1929. He

Thrill to the names—El Dorado, Searchlight, Medicine Bow, Mesa Verde, Tombstone, Durango, Hole in the Wall, Lost Trail Pass, Nez Perce National Forest. Active names, implying that something consequential is going on: the Wind River Range, the Magic Valley, the River of No Return, the Painted Desert, Wolf Point, Paradise, Death Valley, the Crazy Mountains.

may be easier to lasso the wind than to find a sustaining story for the American West. Still, as storytellers it is our obligation to keep trying.