Quotes About History

This original version of Coca-Cola contained a small amount of coca extract and therefore a trace of cocaine. (It was eliminated early in the twentieth century, though other extracts derived from coca leaves remain part of the drink to this day.) Its creation was not the accidental concoction of an amateur experimenting in his garden, but the deliberate and painstaking culmination of months of work by an experienced maker of quack remedies.

Six beverages in particular—beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and cola—chart the flow of world history. Three contain alcohol, and three contain caffeine, but what they all have in common is that each one was the defining drink during a pivotal historical period, from antiquity to the present day.

During the first millennium BCE, even the beer-loving Mesopotamians turned their backs on beer, which was dethroned as the most cultured and civilized of drinks, and the age of wine began.

By tracing the careers of the four members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club, Laura Snyder has found a wonderful way not just to tell the great stories of 19th-century science, but to bring them vividly to life.

Although it is no longer customary to offer visitors a straw through which to drink from a communal vat of beer, today tea or coffee may be offered from a shared pot, or a glass of wine or spirits from a shared bottle. And when drinking alcohol in a social setting, the clinking of glasses symbolically reunites the glasses into a single vessel of shared liquid. These are traditions with very ancient origins.

You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?

I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.

Longer metaphors, in the form of stories, allow more sophisticated relationships: […] In planning, the boundaries between myth, history and fiction are not so consequential as one might think.

Let me let you in on a little secret," he writes. "If you are hearing about something old, it is almost certainly good. Why? Because nobody wants to talk about shitty old stuff, but lots of people still talk about shitty new stuff, because they are still trying to figure out if it is shitty or not. The past wasn't better, we just forgot about all the shitty shit.

John Stilgoe, Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places (New York: Walker and Co., 1998), 94.

Their memory's like a train: you can see it getting smaller as it pulls away And the things you can't remember Tell the things you can't forget that History puts a saint in every dream.

Songs really are like a form of time travel because they really have moved forward in a bubble. Everyone who's connected with it, the studio's gone, the musicians are gone, and the only thing that's left is this recording which was only about a three-minute period maybe 70 years ago.

And the things you can't remember tell the things you can't forget that history puts a saint in every dream.

And they all pretend they're Orphans And their memory's like a train You can see it getting smaller as it pulls away And the things you can't remember Tell the things you can't forget that History puts a saint in every dream

George Bush is a fan of mine, he came to see me in the Seventies. His coke dealer brought him.

The studio is torn down, all the people who played on it are dead, the instruments have been sold off. But you are listening to a moment that happened in time sixty years ago and you are hearing it just as sharp as when it was made. That remains an amazing thing to me.

Eerily, the awakening occurred eighteen years to the day from Samuel Morse's "What hath God wrought" message. When Confederate general Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson changed the nature of the war by marching to threaten Washington, Lincoln responded by changing the nature of his leadership.

By one estimate, more books were printed in the first fifty years after Gutenberg's discovery than had been copied by all the scribes in Europe in the previous thousand years.

Mr. Watson—Come here" joined "What hath God wrought" in immortality

On average it took 22 days for news to travel between New York City and Charleston; and 26 days to reach Savannah.

History shows that when you attack the majority it usually doesn't work out well for the minority.

Some people care more about that happened a 100 thousand years ago than they care where they will be in 100 years from now.

If Samuel Sharpe had been trying to seize the attention of the mother country – just as Nat Turner had given the American South a brief window through which to reconsider slavery – he succeeded far beyond what he might have hoped. Never before had enslaved people spoken so loudly in Britain.

He delivered his dissertation about the Founding Fathers with such exactitude.