Quotes About History

In American history, racism has not been a constant but a variable which came, went and came again.

New York City today still preserves qualities which existed in seventeenth-century New Amsterdam—and Old Amsterdam

race slavery did not create the culture of the southern colonies; that culture created slavery.

The same cultural values which caused secession were also partly responsible for its eventual defeat.

Two generations ago, historians wrote of European saints and Indian savages. In the last generation, too many scholars have been writing about Indian saints and European savages. The opportunity for our generation is to go beyond that calculus of saints and savages altogether, and write about both American Indians and Europeans with maturity, empathy, and understanding.

Deference also had a reciprocal posture called condescension—a word which has radically changed its meaning

If slavery was not quite what Virginians really wanted, it carried them closer to their conservative utopia than any alternative which lay within reach.

When one southerner was asked why so many people were killed in his region, he answered that "there were just more folks in the South that needed killing.

One of the most stubborn myths of American history is the idea that the frontier promoted equality of material condition.

The history of the early abolitionist movement," writes historian Arthur Zilversmit, "is essentially the record of Quaker antislavery activities.

Mumbett also had another family of her own. Her great-grandson was W. E. B. Du Bois. In his writings, he remembered her with pride, as an inspiration for his stellar career in American and world history.

We live in a country which is spavined with ancestor- worship. This country will never, can never prosper until it escapes from its past.

From the moment of its founding Americans began freeing their slaves—some 500,000 by the early 1800s—and in 1808 outlawed the slave trade entirely.

Every Communist revolution begins as a rape of the present and continues as a cannibalization of the past.

It is an archetypal Sixties case history—the rejection of real solutions in favor of demands that are made with the knowledge they cannot be met.

Like most of the left's leaders, I was a Marxist and a socialist. I believed in the "dialectic" of history and therefore, even though I knew that the societies calling themselves Marxist were ruled by ruthless dictatorships, I believed they would soon evolve into socialist democracies. I attributed their negative features to under-development and to the capitalist pasts from which they had emerged.

As Pax Christi USA, a Catholic organization, explained: "Law in the U.S. protects white skin privilege because white male landowners created the laws to protect their rights, their culture and their wealth.

Memoirs and historical monographs by New Left historians painted a virginal portrait of radical protesters, rewriting the history of the period on a scale that would have seemed impossible outside the Communist bloc. In his own memoir, Hayden includes pages of excerpts from his FBI file, interspersed with disingenuous presentations of his political career that keep his readers in the dark about many of the far-from-innocent activities in which he actual1y engaged.

Of course, the political history of the United States is exactly the reverse. It is in large measure the history of a nation that led the world in eliminating slavery, in accommodating peoples it had previously defeated, in elevating nonwhites to a position of dignity and respect, in promoting opportunities and rights to women, and in fostering a healthy skepticism towards unworthy leaders and towards the dangers inherent in government itself.

Because there is only one salvation left for Germany, and that is Hitler.

History judges you by your success or failure," he pontificated. "That's what counts. Nobody asks the victor whether he was in the right or wrong." Before

History judges you by your success or failure," he pontificated. "That's what counts. Nobody asks the victor whether he was in the right or wrong.

Despite everything," she wrote to Erwin on September 4 from Wiener Neustadt, "we were all hoping to the very end that a second world war could be avoided—we all hoped that reason would prevail in Britain and France. . . . Now the Führer has left last night for the Polish front.

Their triumphant histories portrayed the sachem as having almost single-handedly led his people into a misguided rebellion by virtue of his supposedly savage pride and susceptibility to the devil, only to be crushed by a superior, civilized people favored by God.