Quotes About History

Finally, at one p.m. on Tuesday, February 17, 180161, on the thirty-sixth ballot, Jefferson prevailed. R

The Ku Klux Klan," the Reverend Charles Jefferson, the pro-Klan author of Roman Catholicism and the Ku Klux Klan, said, "is the Mussolini of America.

the enslaved "would make the dense old woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness.

A revealing, oft-cited detail: Mississippi earmarked 20 percent of its entire state budget in 1866 for wooden limbs.)

the fact that we have arrived at a place in the life of the nation where a grand wizard of the KKK can claim, all too plausibly, that he is at one with the will of the president of the United States seems an unprecedented moment.

while whites built and dreamed, people of color were subjugated and exploited by a rising nation that prided itself on the expansion of liberty. Those twin tragedies shaped us then and ever after.

When we condemn posterity for slavery, or for Native American removal, or for denying women their full role in the life of the nation, we ought to pause and think: What injustices are we perpetuating even now that will one day face the harshest of verdicts by those who come after us?

No incumbent vice president had been elected to succeed an incumbent president since Martin Van Buren won in 1836.

Jerusalem and a theological event that transformed the world.

For generations Democrats provided many of the most strident segregationists, particularly from the South, a political home, and for the past half century or so, too many Republicans have used coded racial appeals to win votes. Still, they—and we—have also had the ability to rise above their baser impulses.

Washington. In Monroe's Cabinet, Secretary of

in hand with the progress of the human mind.… We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

But they always stayed in the arena, grappling with each other and with Stalin to find a way to win. Had they failed, or truly fallen out with each other, we could be living in a different world.

And so while whites built and dreamed, people of color were subjugated and exploited by a rising nation that prided itself on the expansion of liberty. Those twin tragedies shaped us then and ever after.

History, then, mattered enormously, for it could repeat itself at any time in any generation.12 And if that history brought tyranny, it was to be fought at all costs.

You've just got to pick the man you think is best on the basis of his past history

One point of this book is to remind us that imperfection is the rule, not the exception. On Thursday, December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, who worked as a seamstress at the Montgomery Fair department store, was arrested after refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger in Jim Crow–era Alabama.

If he did not suffer, if he did not bleed, if he did not feel every bit of the pain of execution as he gulped for air, then he would not be the Christ we know. He was fulfilling his epochal role in history on that cross; he was not playacting, not a god pretending to die. He was the Word made flesh, who was, however strangely and incomprehensibly, full of grace and truth.

Surely, in the light of history," Mrs. Roosevelt remarked, "it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try.

Writing in 1903, the scholar, historian, and activist W.E.B. Du Bois observed that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line," and, while Du Bois was surely right, it is correct, too, to say that color in some ways remains the problem of American history as a whole.

The Memphis Commercial Appeal said, "President Roosevelt has committed a blunder that is worse than a crime, and no atonement or future act of his can remove the self-imprinted stigma." Alabama's Geneva Reaper was especially harsh. "Poor Roosevelt!" the paper wrote. "He might now just as well sleep with Booker Washington, for the scent of that coon will follow him to the grave as far as the South is concerned.

He dreamed big but understood that dreams become reality only when their champions are strong enough and wily enough to bend history to their purposes. Broadly put, philosophers think; politicians maneuver. Jefferson's genius was that he was both and could do both, often simultaneously. Such is the art of power.

To know what has come before is to be armed against despair.

For the first hundred years, as far as I could tell, all that happened in America was that various people named Nathaniel had purchased land near rivers.