Quotes About History

In 1942, only about 4 percent of American women had completed four years of college.

the women used these Enigma messages—along with files on individual U-boats and their commanders—to track, with pins, every U-boat and convoy whose location was known. At another desk, several other Goucher women, including Jacqueline Jenkins (later the mother of Bill Nye, aka Bill Nye the Science Guy), tracked "neutral shipping" based on daily position reports.

the Signal Corps recruited U.S. switchboard operators who were bilingual in English and French and loaded them into ships bound for Europe. Known as the "Hello Girls," these were the first American women other than nurses to be sent by the U.S. military into harm's way. The officers whose calls they connected often prefaced their conversations by saying, "Thank Heaven you're here!

Women were more than placeholders for the men. Women were active war agents. Through their brainwork, the women had an impact on the fighting that went on. This is an important truth, and it is one that often has been overlooked.

It was a rare moment in American history—unprecedented—when educated women were not only wanted but competed for.

Our friendship had turned into a souvenir book filled with history and cool childhood-friend stories that we trotted out at parties. It was the envy of all our new acquaintances. It was like an old set of company china—carefully set out to be viewed and shown off, but no one actually eats off it. The friendship hadn't been functional for some time.

I naively thought that all I had to do to pull this off was toss my fat history out like trash. I couldn't make the deal fast enough.

As early as 1212 their craft had been subject to building regulations that required, for example, that roofs should be covered with non-flammable materials such as stone or tiles, not thatch, and that privies had to be sited well within the plot boundary. Judging by the repetition of these rules over the years, they don't appear to have been strictly observed.

the Dyers' Company could trace their skills back to the ancient British liking for donning warpaint. 'The secret of dyeing wools and woollen goods was familiar to those who pursued that craft, as it was little more than an evolution from the British custom of staining the person with woad or some other pigment', according to a nineteenth-century history of the Dyers' Company.

ginger would have been far more widely used.

The general drink was ale. Most households of any size made their own, every few days. The advantage of adding hops was that it produced a longer-lasting brew, but that was still in the future.

A medieval physician needed the patient's astronomical details, just as a modern GP would check his or her blood pressure.

The days of recording family births, deaths and marriages in the family Bible were far distant.

I'm not giving up my history and what I've done in my music because I love it and I'm very proud of it. I just want to open it up for more people.

Honorable men were keeping their word, my son, long before this Christian religion was proposed.

The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken.

Whenever a group produces murderers, the early parental relationship must have been abusive and neglectful. Yet this elementary truth has not even begun to be considered in historical research; just stating that poor mothering lies behind wars seems blasphemous.

Thanks to dreams, in the history of the galaxy the world has been reinvented more often than there are stars.

For hundreds of millions of years, Sex was the most efficient method for propagating information of dubious provenance: the origins of all those snippets of junk DNA are lost in the sands of reproductive history. Move aside, Sex: the world-wide Web has usurped your role.

[With quantum computers] you can calculate how many bits are in the universe, how much energy it takes to flip them, how much energy exists, and use that to rule out lots of things about the universe's history. Anything that takes more bit flips couldn't have happened.

The danger is that Hegel's logic could be twisted to justify anything that happens in history.

All the entertainment and talk of history is nothing almost but fighting and killing: and the honour and renown that is bestowed on conquerors (who for the most part are but the great butchers of mankind) farther mislead growing youth, who by this means come to think slaughter the laudible business of mankind, and the most heroic of virtues.

Men are men and women are women. We've tried for tens of thousands of years to lay down hard and fast lines for the sexes to walk upon, and we've failed miserably.

Our names are labels, plainly printed on the bottled essence of our past behavior.