Quotes About History

Just as there are phantom limbs there are phantom histories, histories that are severed and discarded, but linger on as thwarted possibilities an compelling nostalgias.

A story is told of Alfred Adler, one of Freud's early followers, who once interviewed a prospective patient at great length, taking a detailed family history, and getting as elaborate an account as possible of what the man was suffering from. At the end of this three-hour consultation Adler apparently said to the man, 'What would you do if you were cured?' The man answered him, and Adler said, 'Well, go and do it then.' That was the treatment.

The past influences everything and dictates nothing.

slaveowners and their allies in the United States tried to protect their country from the most democratic, egalitarian, and terrifying prospect of the Age of Revolution: a generalized slave rebellion.

The Tohopeka massacre, known afterward as the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, was the bloodiest battle in the long history of conflict between American Indians and the United States.

That forced labor gradually became discredited at the same time as it expanded is surely one of the great paradoxes of world history in the nineteenth century.

Migrants identified cotton growing with slave labor as if the relationship were natural.

Antislavery, rather than slavery, was the world-historical innovation of the era.

One assiduous historian has recently estimated that approximately 170,000 slaves were introduced into North America between 1783 and 1810, with more than 100,000 of these arriving in the first decade of the nineteenth century.

brain activity in a heartbeat. All of that says Richard. But the DNA in consort with the paper trail of a genealogy available only for royalty says this was him. Richard III is now the oldest person to be unequivocally identified in death.

The seven billion of us alive today are, according to all the evidence available to us, the last remaining group of human great apes from a set of at least four that existed 50,000 years ago.

For our purposes, if we are to look at the evolution that led to where we are now, instead of the nice neat tree, I think it could reasonably be described as one big, million-year clusterfuck.

For the sake of perspective, life has existed on Earth for about 3.9 billion years. The species Homo sapiens, of which you are a member, emerged a mere 300,000 years ago, as far as we know, in pockets in the east and north of Africa. Writing began about 6,000 years ago, in Mesopotamia, somewhere in what we now call the Middle East.

But they also became us, and we will find them in the old bones and inside our own cells. We carry the past with us. There was no beginning, and there are no missing links, just the ebb and flow and ebb again of living through epochs. Those ancient people never went extinct—we just merged.

All life is set for extinction over a long enough timescale; more than 97 percent of species that have ever existed are already gone.

We can't agree definitively on what happened in the last decade. Newspapers record stories with biases firmly in place.

from a time when there were at least four human species on Earth right up to the kings of Europe into the eighteenth century.

most recent common ancestor of everyone alive today on Earth lived only around 3,400 years ago.

there is no contemporary evidence even for the existence of Jesus Christ, arguably the most influential man in history. Most of our tales about his life were written in the decades after his death by people who had never met him.

Our findings suggest a remarkable proposition: no matter the languages we speak or the color of our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and who laboured to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu.

Homo sapiens comes into being from 300,000 years ago, according to specimens from Morocco and east Africa, and by 100,000 years ago we have bodies pretty much the same as we do today.

Nowadays, only the willfully ignorant dismiss the truth that we evolved from earlier ancestors.

The oldest genome of a European comes from a 37,000-year-old square-jawed man who washed up on the banks of the mighty River Don in southern Russia. He's called Kostenki today, and his DNA showed similarities with more recent European hunter-gatherers, as far afield as in Spain 30,000 years later

Estimates are that the hunter-gatherers who were all but wiped out by the agricultural revolution numbered around 2 million 12,000 years ago. Agriculture spread like a virus over the continents from its birth somewhere in the Middle East (and dotted in other spots in Africa and China), and would be the dominant business of humans for most of the rest of history.