Quotes About History

Garfield fought side by side with African Americans during the Civil War; and after the War, he worked side by side with America's first African American congressmen to pass those early civil rights bills.

Few Americans are aware that many of the soldiers who fought during the American Revolution were black – and unlike the later segregated regiments in the Civil War, many of the units in the American Revolution were fully integrated, with black patriots fighting and dying side by side with their white fellow comrades and soldiers. 5

few learn about the first slaves that arrived in the Massachusetts Colony set up by the Christian Pilgrims and Puritans. When that slave ship arrived in Massachusetts, the ship's officers were arrested and imprisoned and the kidnapped slaves were returned to Africa at the Colony's expense.

African American history – so much of it is truly unknown today. For example, few know of James Armistead – a black patriot and spy who helped make possible the 1781 Yorktown victory during the American Revolution that established America as an independent nation. 1

History repeatedly demonstrates that all governments that do not have comprehensive internal safeguards and restraints accounting for the inherent "depravity of man" will eventually become selfish, corrupt, oppressive, and then tyrannical.

Because our current educational system now graduates students lacking even minimal historical knowledge, citizens are misled by outlandish charges Modernists make about not only Jefferson but also other Founders as well as traditionally venerated historical events. If rudimentary historical literacy is to be achieved today, it must be individually secured, for it is no longer possible to rely on public schools (and even many private schools) for this once elementary knowledge

Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for zyklon b, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental missiles , military space platforms and nuclear weapons? If memory serves it was not the Vatican.

Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for Zyklon B, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental ballistic missiles, military space platforms, and nuclear weapons? If memory serves, it was not the Vatican.

Neither the Nazis nor the Communists, he affirms, acted because of their atheism. They were simply keen to kill a great many people. Atheism had nothing to do with it. They might well have been Christian Scientists.

As a way of getting in touch with my origins every night I set the alarm clock for the time I was born so that waking up becomes a historical reenactment and the first thing I do

As a way of getting in touch with my origins every night I set the alarm clock for the time I was born so that waking up becomes a historical reenactment...

It was Churchill himself who described Sir John Jellicoe, the commander-in-chief, as "the only man who could lose the war in an afternoon".

vaporised thousands of people in the centre of Hiroshima, leaving their shadows scorched into the walls behind them

It reveals both the failures and the huge successes of the navy at the end of a brutal and brutalising war.

Between 1000 C.E. and 1945, the longest period of uninterrupted peace in Europe was a fifty-one-year stretch between the Battle of Waterloo and the Austro-Prussian War. That tranquil period came amid the industrial revolution, as millions moved from farm to city. Was it harder, for a while, to find soldiers? Or did people feel too busy to fight?

Russian President and "ex" KGB agent Vladimir Putin calls the fall of the USSR "history's greatest tragedy," and he pours special blame-hatred for that calamity at George Soros.

There was a time, in living memory, when this nation bestrode the planet like a titan.

Would we be tormenting ourselves over the Kennedy assassination today if fifty cameras had been rolling, instead of just poor Abraham Zapruder's?

Always, before, whenever one culture went into decline, there were others ready to take up the slack. If Rome toppled, there was light shining in Constantinople, then the Baghdad Caliphate and in China. If Philippine Spain turned repressive, Holland welcomed both refugees and science. When most of Europe went mad, in the mid–twentieth century, the brightest minds moved to America. When America grew self-indulgent and riven by new civil war, that migration sloshed and shifted East.

And yet we've flashed from caveman to world wrecker in just three hundred generations.

And yet we've flashed from caveman to world wrecker in just three hundred generations. One moment there are these barefoot Neolithic hunters, bickering over a frozen caribou carcass. Turn around, and their children's children talk about tapping energy from pulsars.

Personal narrative is not simply opening up a vein and letting the blood flow toward anyone willing to stare. The historical self is created to keep dissonance at bay and render the subject palatable in the present.

Truth is singular and lies are plural, but history - the facts of what happened is both immutable and mostly unknowable.

Trying to look at the whole of the past is, it seems to me, like using a map of the world. No geographer would try to teach exclusively from street maps. Yet most historians teach about the past of particular nations, or even of agrarian civilizations, without ever asking what the whole of the past looks like.