Quotes About History

the tattered paper with Mark Flannery, The Irish Rose, Delancey Street,

Other resources I relied on during my orphan train research were the Children's Aid Society; the New York Foundling (I attended their 140th homecoming in 2009 and met a number of train riders there); the New York Tenement Museum;

Here are young women with more opportunities, more liberties than almost any women in history and at that moment we tell them they're short-changed silenced victims of a patriarchy? It's defeatist and demoralising.

Man's discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe," concluded the American writer Susan Brownmiller in her groundbreaking account of rape, Against Our Will, published in 1975

So worried by the chaos were the British that between Christmas 1928 and New Year 1929 they organised an airlift first of their women and children then of all personnel, the first large-scale air evacuation in history

Just as women's bodies are softer than men's, so their understanding is sharper." ? Christine de Pizan She was the first woman in France to earn a living by her writing! Born 1364, she advocated for women's equality, wrote poetry, novels, biography, an autobiography, literary, political and religious commentary. She was the widowed mother of three and, perhaps, the first feminist!

Toute connaissance est le produit d'une situation historique, qu'elle le sache ou non. Mais qu'elle le sache ou non fait une grande différence ; si elle ne le sait pas, si elle se prétend "neutre", elle nie l'histoire qu'elle prétend expliquer, elle est idéologie et non connaissance. Toute connaissance qui ne reconnaît pas, qui ne prend pas pour prémisse l'oppression sociale, la nie, et en conséquence la sert objectivement.

L'échec de ses tentatives est dû à ce qu'elles ont toutes accepté la prétention exorbitante de la psychanalyse d'être, non pas un système d'interprétation de la subjectivité, mais la subjectivité même [...] Sous couvert d'introduire le matérialisme dans la subjectivité, on introduisait en fait l'ennemi dans la place, l'idéalisme dans l'histoire.

Sa më e pabesueshme të jetë një histori, aq më lehtë e besojnë njerëzit atë.

It seems to me now a shocking commentary on the press of our time that I pushed the hydrogen-bomb tests on Eniwetok right off the front pages. A tragic war was still raging in Korea, George VI had died and Britain had a new queen, sophisticated guided missiles were going off in New Mexico, Jonas Salk was working on a vaccine for infantile paralysis...Christine Jorgensen was on page one.

The history of the world may be writ in your cells, all of it personal to your lineage and some of it part of the broader context, but though you have been shaped by history, you have only been shaped by some of it. Fundamentally,

Africans believed they were being captured and shipped over the ocean to be eaten. The insecurity of life in a world of slavery is hard to imagine, let alone the extraordinary length of time that the threat of abduction loomed.

Study the past if you would define the future. —Confucius O

After a few minutes, though, I started to take in what all the attendees were looking at: hundreds and hundreds of historical documents, self-published books, CD-ROMs with lists of lists of names, databases chock-full of people who had once lived and whom no living person now remembered. Everyone in this hall was looking for someone who was gone forever.

The nineteenth-century German missionary Sigismund Koelle asked over 140 ex-slaves how they had been taken. Almost 20 percent of them told him that family or friends had given them up.

If the hyperconnectedness of humanity is true, it would mean that everyone alive today—you, your neighbor, Vladimir Putin, and the emperor of Japan—could count the same Egyptian pharaoh, as well as everyone else alive at the time, as a distant grandparent.

Where genealogy was concerned, I met many people who proclaimed their indifference to it, but it was often an extremely vigorous indifference.

It is extremely unlikely that anyone in the twenty-first century does not have some consanguinity in his or her family within the last three hundred years. Yet according to Feldman, more than half of all human populations today still engage in consanguineous marriage, and up to 10 percent of all humans are in first- or second-cousin marriages.

Totalitarian power thrives when it alienates people from basic information about themselves. When European slavers abducted people from Africa, they essentially took away their history as well.

As of 2014 a small handful of well-known companies—Family Tree DNA, 23andMe, and AncestryDNA.com, as well as National Geographic's Genographic Project—and services offer a selection of DNA tests and genealogical connections to the general public.

Here is where it becomes clear that this kind of fine-grained genetic history is the flip side of the family-history coin. Although genealogy is not widely valued in academia, it meshes perfectly with, and helps explain, social history. These small stories about individual lives reveal the way that individual choices shape the biology and the history of whole populations.

As a graduate student Nathan Nunn, now a Harvard economist, began to compare different economies in modern Africa, and he found that the countries that lost more people to the slave trade were also the poorest countries today. How

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present. —Golda Meir

If every chunk of DNA were halved with every generation, the result would be a rather neat picture of proportionately shrinking segments that matched an expanding fan of cousins. But if the cut and shuffle of DNA down through the generations is not a smooth, even process and relatively large chunks of DNA may be passed on through generations more or less unchanged, it has some interesting implications for what DNA can tell us about the past.