Quotes About History

Ironically, Adolf Hitler displayed more knowledge of how we treated Native Americans than American high schoolers today who rely on their textbooks. Hitler admired our concentration camps for American Indians in the west and according to John Toland, his biographer, "often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's extermination—by starvation and uneven combat" as the model for his extermination of Jews and Gypsies (Rom people).94

Cherishing Columbus is a characteristic of white history, not American history.

If you truly want students to take an interest in American history, then stop lying to them.

History, despite its wrenching pain, Cannot be unlived, and if faced With courage, need not be lived again. —MAYA ANGELOU1

The historian must have no country. —JOHN QUINCY ADAMS

As historian Dick de Mildt argues, "By converting the criminal actors of the story into demon-like lunatics, we distance ourselves from them in a radical fashion, assuming them to belong to a different species which only remotely resembles us in physiognomy.

The consequence of this reality was that in virtually every major battle of the Civil War, Confederate soldiers who did not own slaves were fighting against a proportion of Union Army soldiers who had not been asked to give theirs up.

What about the duty to protest? What Mark was doing is as old as Thoreau. Civil disobedience is as American as—killing Indians!" His father smiled, just the smallest curving of his mouth. "That answers itself, Son.

Within weeks I would deploy to Vietnam, that endlessly debated but little-understood war that for the Marine Corps would bring three times the number of dead as were killed in Korea and more total killed and wounded than in any other war, including World War II.

Ghosts walked beside Condley on the muddy trails, dirty and unshaven, burdened by helmets and packs and weapons, loping tiredly, all parts of their bodies half asleep while their eyes stayed bright with fear. The ghosts would always be there, young-faced and yearning, even as time itself erased the evidence of their passing. It was a burden rather than a talent that Condley could walk a village trail and be in two time zones at once, the past just as fresh as today.

Change the fabric of their culture? It hasn't happened yet, not in two thousand years. And it won't happen now.

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.

As I grew older, my love for reading grew stronger. I read with studious interest everything I could find relating to colored men who had gained prominence. My heroes had been King David, then Robert the Bruce; now Frederick Douglass was enshrined in the place of honor.

Revived in this country the long forgotten beauties of Gothic architecture.

August 26, 1557, noted that Mrs. Dawson, widow of one Bryckette, a tooth-drawer, as per orders, "shall paye no quartryge to the hawse nor hange oute any signe or cloth with teethe as she heretofore hath done." Her offense: after the death of her husband, she remarried, yet carried on his trade, becoming the first woman dentist known to history.

Particularly for English people, Shakespeare is always at the forefront of both drama and the English language. He's always been there. I can't remember starting school and not learning about him.

Being in an area of the planet where scientists believe mankind started is quite amazing.

My inspiration comes from the beauty of the past. That's where I am completely omnipotent. -Louise Bourgeois

Because what he couldn't know, what no one at that time could know, was what would happen after the death of old King Sverker.

The history of America is the history of overcoming hardships and that was never more true than during World War II.

June 28, 1940, Congress passed the Alien Registration Act, and Biddle decided to persuade Harrison, whom he knew from legal ties in Philadelphia, into public service. The act made it mandatory, for the first time in American history, for every alien living in the United States to register and be fingerprinted.

SAU&G line originated in 1909 in Crystal City and

He liked familiar things, things that had been worn in by good people, people he could trust.

Niebuhr spoke to that," said Father Tim. "Indeed. He said, 'Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.