Quotes About History

Epidemiological evidence suggests that a new influenza virus originated in Haskell County, Kansas, early in 1918. Evidence further suggests that this virus traveled east across the state to a huge army base, and from there to Europe. Later it began its sweep through North America, through Europe, through South America, through Asia and Africa, through isolated islands in the Pacific, through all the wide world.

In 1918, the world population was 1.8 billion, and the pandemic probably killed 50 to 100 million people, with the lowest credible modern estimate at 35 million. Today the world population is 7.6 billion. A comparable death toll today would range from roughly 150 to 425 million.

Investigators today believe that in the United States the 1918–19 epidemic caused an excess death toll of about 675,000 people.

Quinine worked on one disease: malaria. Many physicians gave it for influenza with no better reasoning than desperation.

Throughout the wars in history more soldiers had often died of disease than in battle or of their wounds. And epidemic disease had routinely spread from armies to civilian populations.

In 1881 he became the first to isolate the pneumococcus, a few weeks before Pasteur and Koch. (None of the three recognized the bacteria's full importance.) Sternberg also first observed that white blood cells engulfed bacteria, a key to understanding the immune system.

More than that, many Puritans believed that if the battle with the Antichrist was commencing, they had to convert the Indians.

Of developed countries, Italy suffered the worst, losing approximately 1 percent of its total population.

Even normal services such as schools were in short supply. Of the twenty largest cities in America, Philadelphia, the city of Benjamin Franklin and the University of Pennsylvania, spent less on education than all but one. In all of South Philadelphia, home to hundreds of thousands of Italians and Jews, there would be no high school until 1934.

Throughout known history there have been periodic pandemics of influenza, usually several a century. They erupt when a new influenza virus emerges. And the nature of the influenza virus makes it inevitable that new viruses emerge.

finally fade away in both the United States and the world. It did not disappear.

As the Hopkins medical school was opening, American theological schools enjoyed endowments of $18 million, while medical school endowments totaled $500,000. The difference in financial support as well as educational systems largely explained why Europeans had achieved the bulk of medical advances.

Thus much of our Western thinking is not scientific and objective but is orientated through a one-eyed perspective which reflects the prejudiced values of the West, and which necessarily prevents the enquirer from seeing the full picture. This is equivalent to what Blaut calls 'Eurocentric tunnel history'.32 What happens, then, when we view the world through a more inclusive two-eyed perspective?

These people marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education and now we've got these knuckleheads walking round.

The great menace of civilization in the present is that we offer an education with too little regard for the roots.

It is only education and understanding of the past that teaches us not to repeat history.

Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.

In the history of enterprise, most of the protagonists of major new products and companies began their education

My favorite subject was either English or History. I had a really awesome high school education.

Without Greek studies there is no education.

Right now, we happen to be in a general period of regression, not just in education. A lot of what's happening is sort of backlash to the 60s; the 60s were a democratizing period.

The opening of the first grammar school was the opening of the first trench against monopoly in Church and State.

When President Kennedy took office, I was in the midst of my education.

What is desperately needed... is the skepticism and the sense of history that a liberal arts education provides.