Quotes About History

Iberville, the Father of Louisiana, died of yellow fever in 1706 in Havana, leaving Bienville the acting governor of Louisiana.

Bienville granted this tract to Louis Juchereau de St. Denys, a friend from Canada and an outstanding figure in Louisiana history. He was one of the first settlers in Louisiana, arriving on his second visit with Iberville in 1699 at the age of twenty-three.

An Ursuline nun was the first pharmacist in Louisiana.

On March 2, 1699, Iberville arrived at the mouth of the river, where there was fresh water and a strong current. The following day, Shrove Tuesday, they began their travels up the river. Finding a bayou twelve miles upstream, they named it in honor of the holiday, Mardi Gras Bayou, and thus was Mardi Gras introduced to the Louisiana territory

At the bluff above the river, which Iberville considered a good spot for a settlement, he saw a red stick, the maypole used by the Indians for hanging up offerings of fish and game. Iberville called the place Baton Rouge.

O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.

I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.

The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.

One difference between the West and the South, I came to realize in 1970, was this: in the South they remained convinced that they had bloodied their land with history. In California we did not believe that history could bloody the land, or even touch it.

In the South they are convinced that they have bloodied their place with history. In the West we do not believe that anything we do can bloody the land, or change it, or touch it.

The time warp: the Civil War was yesterday, but 1960 is spoken of as if it were about three hundred years ago.

By way of comment I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.

Did not the Donner-Reed Party, after all, eat its own dead to reach Sacramento?

Years ago, if a white woman said a Black man looked at her lustfully, he could be hung higher than a magnolia tree in bloom, while a white mob watched joyfully sipping tea and eating cookies," Yusef Salaam's mother reminded readers of the Amsterdam News.

Marriage is memory, marriage is time

The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself.

As it happens I am comfortable with the Michael Laskis of this world, with those who live outside rather than in, those in whom the sense of dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed commitments; I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.

Not where are they now, dead seven years, But what they were then?

it is hard for me to believe that Cornelius Vanderbilt did not sense, at some point in time, in some dim billiard room of his unconscious, that when he built "The Breakers" he damned himself.

By 'the long view' I believe she meant history. Or more exactly, the particular undertow of having and not having, the convulsions of a world largely unaffected by the individual efforts of anyone in it, that Inez's experience had tended to deny.

This was a California girl, and she was raised on a history that placed not much emphasis on why. She was never an idealist, and this pleased no one. She was tainted by survival. She came back from the other side with a story no one wanted to hear, a dispiriting account of a situation in which delusion and incompetence were pitted against delusion and incompetence of another kind, and in the febrile rhythms of San Francisco in the midseventies it seemed a story devoid of high notes.

Fierce loyalty. That's how the Kurds survived for two and a half thousand years while the Hitties and the Phrygians died out. Communal Loyalty.

His best moment was when he walked up the majestic stairway to the second floor of the Met; he loved the glorious spaces of old exhibition halls. Not that they knew about old here, with buildings always being blasted and rebuilt higher. How did people in this city keep track of themselves, with so much coming at them at once?

he was in a museum of immaculate dust - and nothing was exactly gone