Quotes About History

Los Alamos. Young Robert Oppenheimer first approached it in the summer of 1922.

Emancipations as they progressed within less revolutionary states included Holland-Belgium, 1795; Sweden, 1848; Denmark and Greece, 1849; England by a gradual unmuddling completely in 1866; Austria, 1867; Spain by the withdrawal of its 1492 order of expulsion in 1868; the new German Empire, 1871. Though they were influential out of all proportion to their numbers, the emancipated Jews of Western Europe, many of whom moved directly to assimilate, were only a minute fraction of the Diaspora.

Later, I realized that reviewing the history of nuclear physics served another purpose as well: It gave the lie to the naive belief that the physicists could have come together when nuclear fission was discovered (in Nazi Germany!) and agreed to keep the discovery a secret, thereby sparing humankind the nuclear burden.

hydropower is an obvious first choice for generating electricity. The Willamette Falls Electric Company installed the first AC hydroelectric power station in the United States in 1889 to send power from Oregon City to Portland, Oregon, thirteen miles away.

Conant in his 1943 secret history thought the "most important" reason the program changed direction in the autumn of 1941 was that "the all-out advocates of a head-on attack on the uranium problem had become more vocal and determined" and mentioned Oliphant's influence first of all.

Twentieth Century Book of the Dead.

By 27 April, Dammam No. 7 had produced more than 100,000 barrels.30 Across the decades, until it was shut down in 1982, No. 7 alone produced more than 32 million barrels of oil.

The history of liquid energy is a history of pipelines.

The Stanley Steamer was the best-selling car in America in 1898. Two years later, notes the historian Rudi Volti, "of the 4,192 cars produced in the United States in 1900, 1,681 were steamers, 1,575 were electrics, and only 936 used internal combustion engines.

The hydrogen bomb was thus under development in the United States onward from July 1942.

Chamberlain moved again to concession. "Appeasement" was at that time a popular and not a pejorative word.

Setting omnibuses on rails increased the number of passengers that horses could haul and improved the ride. In 1856, when New York City's Common Council judged street-level steam locomotives to be dangerous and barred them below Forty-Second Street, horse-drawn street railways replaced them.

Men like to recall, in later years, what they said at some important or possibly historic moment in their lives. . . . I remember only too well what I said to General Somervell that day. I said, "Oh." As

On the cold winter afternoon of 2 December 1942, in a disused doubles squash court under the stands of the University of Chicago football stadium, the Nobel laureate physicist Enrico Fermi, a refugee from Fascist Italy, calmly initiated the world's first controlled nuclear-fission chain reaction.

few of the fathers of physicists were businessmen.

By the turn of the century, the electric streetcar had largely replaced the use of horses in public transportation. The animals continued to serve for general hauling, merchandise delivery, and small-scale energy generation. In fact, their urban numbers actually increased.32 Only the development of the internal combustion engine and its application to power the truck and the automobile across the years 1900 to 1915 replaced the city horse with mechanical transportation.

If you look at the history of heretics who are condemned, their transgression is normally about issues of authority, priesthood, administration of sacraments, and "Who's got the power?" I cannot think of anyone who was ever burned at the stake for not taking care of the widows and orphans, or for any issues of orthopraxy.

God did not just start talking to us with the Bible or the church or the prophets. Do we really think that God had nothing at all to say for 13.7 billion years, and started speaking only in the latest nanosecond of geological time? Did all history prior to our sacred texts provide no basis for truth or authority? Of course not. The radiance of the Divine Presence has been glowing and expanding since the beginning of time, before there were any human eyes to see or know about it.

Western people are a ritually starved people, and in this are different than most of human history.

Without elders, much of our history has been formed by juniors reacting, overreacting, and protecting their own temporary privilege, with no deep-time vision like the Iroquois Nation, which considered, "What would be good for the next seven generations?" Compare that to the present "Tea Party" movement in America.

The way to transmute the pain of life is to reveal the wounded side of things, evil, even, and then place the wound inside of sacred space. The Bible is about naming, facing, and then forgiving the wounds of history.

With improved historical records, and easier access to them, we actually have better reasons for hating one another, for anger and violence toward one another.

Yet historically, the teaching of original sin started us off on the wrong foot—with a no instead of a yes, with a mistrust instead of a trust.

The lie was that we believed that we believed all people were created equal! What made us think we were this great free society? Those at the top believed it then, and we at the top believe it two hundred years later. That's the power of myth.