Quotes About History

Wampanoags did not lose their land any more than Indians elsewhere on the continent. No, colonists and their successors took it through every means at their disposal.

If how we tell history is one of the ways we shape our present and future, we can do no better than to rethink the myth of the First Thanksgiving and its role in the Thanksgiving holiday.

Throughout the 1680s, Plymouth ordered Wampanoags "out of the country" for crimes like theft, assault, and rape to which colonists would normally receive corporal punishment and fines.

the Mayflower landed not in a virgin land but a widowed land. Epidemic disease had already nearly emptied a long stretch of coastline that once thronged with people.

If the Wampanoags are as much our fellow Americans as the descendants of the Pilgrims, and if their history can be as instructional and inspirational as that of the English, then why continue to tell a Thanksgiving myth that focuses exclusively on the colonists' struggles rather than theirs?

Getting beyond the sanitized Thanksgiving myth to tell a more accurate history of that encounter involves reckoning with a point made by many Wampanoags today: that their storied welcome to the English was a terrible mistake, born out of the horror of a disease without a name.

Most of us who are not Wampanoag or American Indian will never fully grasp the raw emotions indigenous people associate with Thanksgiving.

Oppression and opposition to Jews is nothing new in world history. The descendants of Abraham were enslaved in Egypt for 400 years, then the ten northern tribes were captured by the Assyrians in 722 BC and the two southern tribes by the Babylonians in 586 BC. (Granted, these captivities were due to the Jews' sins.) Then Rome crushed the Jews in AD 70, dispersing them into the

Palestinians" is a generic term used to refer to Arabs who occupied the land of Palestine prior to 1948 and who were displaced when Israel was made a nation. Palestinians resent that displacement; they want their land back, and they want Israel to be erased from the map. They want Jews either to be killed or to leave their land and live elsewhere in the world. Acts of terrorism are their ongoing effort to attack Israel's right to exist.

soon as a culture has reached a certain level, probably measured largely by its literacy, cryptography appears spontaneously—as

For almost a thousand years, from before 500 to 1400, the cryptology of Western civilization stagnated.

Cryptology served magical purposes frequently throughout the Middle Ages, and even in the Renaissance was still disguising important parts of alchemical formulas.

But of any science of cryptanalysis, there was nothing. Only cryptography existed. And therefore cryptology, which involves both cryptography and cryptanalysis, had not yet come into being so far

The Arabic knowledge of cryptography was fully set forth in the section on cryptology in the Subh al-a 'sha, an enormous, 14-volume encyclopedia

It was Von Choltitz who had given the order in May 1940 to firebomb the inner city of Rotterdam

Maybe your history just repeats and repeats until it batters you enough to snap the seams that hold you together

Gone is not forgotten, but our lives cannot be a memorial. This city cannot be a memorial. This city has to be a city. Our lives have to be our lives.

Is that all we need? Can the way we say each other's names encompass all our history, all our love, all our fear, all our fights, all our reunions, all of what we know about each other, all of what we don't know?

Maybe that's what history is, you go from one I can't believe it the next. And sometimes the I can't believe its are good, and sometimes they're bad. But the sum total of positive ones always outweighs the negative ones.

Now when I have to remember a date, all I have to do is consult my rap sheet.

All couples get nostalgic about the start of their story.

All this history...,' Danny says, then trails off. Lost in it. Feeling it connect. Realizing the weight of the world comes largely from its past.

I was treating the past as if it could be mined for clues, for reasons. But the past resists that. It holds too much evidence of too many things.

Elijah is overwhelmed by the sheer fact of all the people who have walked over this very spot. As he watches Nikes and loafers glide past, he tries to fathom the feet of centuries ago. A person could stay in this same place his whole life and meet millions of people from all over the world. But instead, everyone moves on, and meets no one.