Quotes About History

The theatrical performance of politicians who profess to speak for an "American People" do nothing to highlight the history of poverty.

The leaders of Jamestown had borrowed directly from the Roman model of slavery: abandoned children and debtors were made slaves.

History is not a bedtime story. It is a comprehensive engagement with often obscure documents and books no longer read—books shelved in old archives, and fragile pamphlets contemporaneous with the subject under study—all of which reflect a world view not ours.

Historical mythmaking is made possible only by forgetting. We have to begin, then, with the first refusal to face reality: most colonizing schemes that took root in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British America were built on privilege and subordination, not any kind of proto-democracy

We tend to forget that an estimated three hundred thousand white southerners, many from the border states, fought for the Union side, and that four border states never seceded.

But today's trailer trash are merely yesterday's vagrants on wheels, an updated version of Okies in jalopies and Florida crackers in their carts. They are renamed often, but they do not disappear.

Populated by what many dismissed as "useless lubbers" (conjuring the image of sleepy and oafish men lolling about doing nothing), North Carolina forged a lasting legacy as what we might call the first white trash colony. Despite being English, despite having claimed the rights of freeborn Britons, lazy lubbers of Poor Carolina stood out as a dangerous refuge of waste people, and the spawning ground of a degenerate breed of Americans.14

In 1790, "squatter" appeared in a Pennsylvania newspaper, but written as "squatlers," describing men who inhabited the western borderlands of that state, along the Susquehanna River. They were men who "sit down on river bottoms," pretend to have titles, and chase off anyone who dares to usurp their claims.5

What's more, the North's unflattering genealogy began in the "bogs and fens" of Ireland and England, where they were spawned from vagabond stock and swamp people.

Nothing like this had occurred in Virginia before. Slavery had been slow to take hold, with only around 150 slaves counted in 1640, and barely 1,000 out of a total population of 26,000 in 1670. Massachusetts and English possessions in the Caribbean, not Virginia, were the first colonies to codify slave law.

People can choose to treasure those parts of their heritage that they see as favorable and wish to keep, jettisoning what unpleasant truths they would prefer to forget.

And so the great American saga, as taught, excludes the very pertinent fact that after the 1630s, less than half came to Massachusetts for religious reasons.

Though Johnson had a proven record as a New Dealer and modern progressive, on the national stage he was still regarded as a regional figure. He refused to go easy on white rule in the South.

The compression of history, the winnowing of history, may seem natural and neutral, but it is decidedly not. It is the means by which grade schools history becomes our standard adult history.

more insidious practices in the colony, wives and children were held accountable for their husband's or father's indentured period of labor.

When the mass migration of 1630 did take place, it was the well-organized John Winthrop who led a fleet of eleven ships, loaded with seven hundred passengers and livestock, and bearing a clear objective to plant a permanent community.

The first slave cargo arrived in Boston in 1638. Winthrop, for his part, owned Indian slaves; his son purchased an African.47

If we do not study ourselves with due attention to disturbing patterns in our history, we will be learning little, and democracy can scarcely claim to be the best form of government.

the great American saga, as taught, excludes the very pertinent fact that after the 1630s, less than half came to Massachusetts for religious reasons.

Unique among the American settlements, Georgia was not motivated by a desire for profit.

meaningful, too, that the recently established Freedmen's Bureau paired impoverished whites and freed people not as cutthroat adversaries, but as the worthy poor. From its inception in 1865, shortly before Lincoln's assassination, the bureau was specifically empowered to extend relief to "all refugees, and all freedmen," black and white.

winnowing of history,

By 1760, only 5 percent of white Georgians owned even a single slave, while a handful of families possessed them in the hundreds.

from fathers cohabiting with daughters, to husbands selling wives, to mothers conniving illicit liaisons for daughters. The danger came from a growing population that had stopped disappearing into the wilderness. Reid was appalled by the filthy refugees living in railroad cars, an uncomfortable foreshadowing of twentieth-century trailer trash.