Quotes About History

To Midshipman Badcock, watching from two ships behind the Victory, the scene was one he would never forget.

the teeth marks he left in it on the day of Trafalgar are visible still.

It did not go to King George III.

The cost had been met by the sale of Louisiana, recently wrested from Spain, to the United States.

Not only that, but Napoleon had called him 'brother'. They were far from being brothers,

the French and Spanish should have closed their line,

as were the chaloupes canonnières,

But the French still thought in terms of wooden ships and sail, as did the English across the Channel.

Plenty of people in England thought Napoleon was doing precisely that.

and more than thirty generals.

But there is one thing that determinists and instrumentalists can agree on: technological advances often mark turning points in history. New tools for hunting and farming brought changes in patterns of population growth, settlement, and labor.

But intellectually, our ancestors' oral culture was in many ways a shallower one than our own.

The clock played a crucial role in propelling us out of the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment.

The earliest examples of reading and writing date back many thousands of years. As long ago as 8000 BC, people were using small clay tokens engraved with simple symbols to keep track of quantities of livestock and other goods.

More than that, though, the way the punch-card tabulator came to be sold and used would set the pattern for the entire modern history of business computing.

According to one estimate, the number of books produced in the fifty years following Gutenberg's invention equaled the number produced by European scribes during the preceding thousand years.

The historical role of classical music as the taken-for-granted high-cultural expression of Western civilization was built on a network of interlinked ideas that included masculinity, whiteness, greatness, national destiny, the colonial order, and a future understood as firmly grounded on the status quo.

In 1792, 300,000 people boycotted sugar from the West Indies—the greatest consumer boycott in history until that point. That year, more people signed a petition against slavery than were eligible to vote in British elections.

The internet, as its proponents rightly remind us, makes for variety and convenience; it does not force anything upon you. Only it turns out it doesn't feel like that at all. We don't feel as if we had freely chosen our online practices. We feel instead that they are habits we have helplessly picked up or that history has enforced, that we are not distributing our attention as we intend or even like to

Concerning postmodernism:] The aim of this experimental history is to disturb the ontological security of modern identity and hence to provoke the possibility of otherness through exposition of the cultural difference concealed by, and within, the order of modern rationalism.

Sitting in the garden of Hitler's former classmates in Leonding, she visualized the beloved features of her Fuhrer suddenly merging into the impersonal Essence of the many-featured One, who spoke Krishna's words to Arjuna. She was certain that she had sought him for centuries, in life after life, until she realized that the founder of the Third Reich was indeed he— the one who comes back, whenever he should ''to establish the reign of Righteousness.

The Tsarist system was not doomed by 1914.

The cotton gin made it possible to grow medium- and short-staple cotton commercially, which led to the spread of the cotton plantation from a small coastal area to most of the South. As cotton planting expanded, so did slavery, and slavery's becoming the central institution of the Southern economy was the central precondition of the Civil War. What

What the mechanical cotton picker did was make obsolete the sharecropper system, which arose in the years after the Civil War as the means by which cotton planters' need for a great deal of cheap labor was satisfied.