Quotes About History

Before dismissing such men as 'mediocre, timid, and weak,' one might ask oneself how many of us would welcome such a war, especially without the knowledge of hindsight?

Sixty years later, a child's primer titled The Anti-slavery Alphabet made the point in rhyme: S is the sugar, that the slave Is toiling hard to make, To put into your pie and tea Your candy and your cake

The rebellion was over, the Union restored, and after more than two centuries there was no more slavery from which to run. The vast work of repairing its human devastation had barely begun.

The problem of the 1850s--how (for Southerners) to preserve slavery without destroying the Union--was a practical problem specific to a particular time and place. But the moral problem of how to reconcile irreconcilable values is a timeless one that, sooner or later, confronts us all.

What a story this place will tell," she said.

The Second World War signalled the creation of the military-industrial complex in Britain and elsewhere. This militarized economy, born out of an imperial system and expanding to vast proportions during the war, largely remained in place into the Cold War.

Not until 1992 did the Catholic Church admit publicly that it had erred in the matter of censoring Galileo's ideas.

in Staten Island.

Earth writes its history with one hand and erases it with the other, and as we go further back in time, erasure gains the upper hand.

Another volunteer Negro soldier named Scott Thomas reported that he had been owned by John Rice, probably also a son of Dangerfield Rice, brother of James Porter Rice, and uncle of my great-grandfather Will Rice.

Slavery proved to be a much more complicated issue for American evangelicals both North and South, who discovered that their religious attitudes and interpretations were colored by their economic interests. This pattern was played out in the history of the Rice family, whose evangelical theology underwent a transformation as they moved within two generations from being small yeoman farmers to landed proprietors whose wealth depended upon the system of chattel slavery.

As the Protestant denominations—Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist and others—were carried into the slave states of the South, into the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas, their churches, pastors, and congregants were dipped in the culture and economy of the South, and increasingly found it necessary to defend and justify the practice of human bondage.

A deep strain of anti-Semitism ran through the teachings and sermons of many fundamentalist leaders such as Ham and William Bell Riley.

American foreign policy and social policy for decades. Christian fundamentalism in America has its roots in the history of the South after the end of the Civil War.

Two more decades would pass before I discovered, almost by chance, that my own great-grandfather had been a Klansman.

Will Rice saw the Ku Klux Klan as an heroic embodiment of the Old South, as protectors of Christian beliefs and defenders of white womanhood, as soldiers who wielded a holy sword in service to the Lost Cause.

On the day of their arrival on Hazel Hill my family's history and fortunes—and my own heritage—were first indissolubly linked with the enslavement of human beings. There Dangerfield bought his first slaves and began building a hemp plantation, the foundation of the family's wealth and success. Just a few years later, in 1827, he died a prominent citizen and prosperous landowner, leaving his second wife Nancy and 11 growing children.

Over the forty-two years that the Rice family lived in Missouri during the 19th century, the family evolved from poor dirt farmers to be the owners of many slaves and several contiguous plantations laid out on broad flat plains and green fields south of the wide river. They could leverage vast wealth embodied in human beings whom they owned as one might own a horse or a hat.

Before Will was two years old, Abraham Lincoln was elected president and the slave states of the South seceded from the Union, launching the Civil War. The war would be murderous and merciless beyond the capacity of any American to imagine in 1861, and both sides used their religion and their notion of God and his justice to define and defend their parts in the mayhem.

The Rice family owned more slaves than most other families in the vicinity of Warrensburg, and on August 13, 1862, the family fortunes suffered a severe blow.

The roots of 20th century American fundamentalism can be discerned in the confluence of these two streams of immigration, culture, and history. A unique American expression of evangelical Christianity emerged—profoundly democratic, anti-royalist and anti-clerical, militant and missional, convinced that God was naturally on the side of Americans. Any who disagreed might be suspected of being on some side other than God's.

The traumatic experience of the Civil War and its aftermath in the 19th century was the incubator of Christian fundamentalism in 20th century America. The agony of the Civil War had a devastating impact on subsequent generations of Southerners, many of whom carried the burden and promise of their Scots-Irish heritage.

The white population of Texas from before the war, then, was never truly beaten, never truly surrendered, and was never brought violently to terms with the new realities.

Especially in Appalachian east Tennessee, where there were few slaves and few slave owners, the evangelical revivals of the Awakening movement cradled the abolition movement.