Quotes About History

Opportunity. In 1988 Bill Pattis joined Charles Z. Wick, Director of the U.S. Information Agency, and participated in the first U.S.-U.S.S.R. Bilateral Information Talks in Moscow, involving leaders from American media and Soviet counterparts. As a result of this work, he was named Chairman of the American Delegation for print media in follow-up talks with the Soviets in February 1990 in Washington, DC, and

Unless some long-lost trove of letters or ' a forgotten diary turns up, I believe that we probably .now know.all

In an essay in American Heritage magazine for September 1999, John Steele Gordon writes of biography as

thanks also to the Library of Virginia, the Library of Congress,

born there on February 22, 1841. Meanwhile, Isaac built a four-room log cabin on his claim, and there his first daughter in his marriage to Mary Ann, Julia Melvina, was born on March 28, 1843. It is altogether

always a challenge. You must come to understand the person, the motivations, the key events that altered the course of history.

there would have been no warfare. One of the great Indian warriors of history was Red Cloud of the Oglala Dakota Sioux tribe, who had a reputation for daring and ferocity. In June of 1866, Sherman called Red Cloud and several other Lakota Sioux leaders to Fort Laramie to discuss a new treaty to permit a new road to be built through Sioux territory. Even before an agreement had been reached, however, a battalion

of we are to believe Helen Cody Wetmore, one of William Cody's sisters, her family was descended from Spanish and Irish royalty, and were accordingly entitled to a crest. In her book Buffalo Bill, Last of the Great Scouts: The Life Story of Colonel William F. Cody, published in 1899, she wrote that her brother was "a lineal descendant of Milesius, king of Spain, that famous monarch whose three sons, Heber, Heremon, and Ir, founded the first dynasty in Ireland about the beginning of the

Cody, Wyoming, 1977. Buffalo Bill Museum. Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Peter H. Hassrick, Director, N.D. "Buffalo Bill's Wild West." Wyoming Horizons. August 1983. Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of the Rough Riders of the World, show programme. Copyrighted by Cody and Salsbury, Chicago, IL, 1893. Doherty, Jim. "Was He Half Hype or Sheer Hero? Buffalo Bill Takes a New

the lives of the Codys in North Platte, Nebraska. Two other volumes have been especially helpful:

and poison gas-a far cry from the days when Cody and the troopers of the Fifth Cavalry rode hell-for-leather across the prairie in pursuit of hostile Indians.

connection. In April 1855 my great-granduncle Alexander Carter Jr. and his younger brother, Thomas Marion Carter, left their home in Scioto County, Ohio, and

In April 1855 my great-granduncle Alexander Carter Jr. and his younger brother,

Turner, Frederick J. "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1893. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1894.

cynical. As his latest biographer, I believe his life has a valuable contribution to make in this new millennium-it provides a sense of who we once were and who we might be again. He was a commanding presence in our American history, a man who helped shape the way we look at that history. It was he, in fact, who created the Wild West, in all its adventure, violence, and romance.

lifetime: the invention of the telephone, the transatlantic cable, the automobile, the airplane, and the introduction of modem warfare, with great armies massed against each other, with tanks, armored cars, flame-throwers, and poison gas-a far cry from the days when Cody and the troopers of the Fifth

In addition, I feel a personal connection. In April 1855 my great-granduncle Alexander Carter Jr. and his younger brother, Thomas Marion Carter, left their home in Scioto County, Ohio, and headed west.

Why should we feel bound today by a document produced more than two centuries ago by a group of fifty-five mortal men, actually signed by only thirty-nine, a fair number of whom were slaveholders, and adopted in only thirteen states by the votes of fewer than two thousand men, all of whom are long since dead and mainly forgotten?2

As with the United States, so too in these other five countries federalism was not so much a free choice as a self-evident necessity imposed by history.

That the idea of equality was alive and well among Viking freemen in the tenth century is attested to by the answer given by some Danish Vikings when, while traveling up a river in France, they were asked by a messenger calling out from the riverbank, "What is the name of your master?" "None," they replied, "we are all equals."3

That the idea of equality was alive and well among Viking freemen in the tenth century is attested to by the answer given by some Danish Vikings when, while traveling up a river in France, they were asked by a messenger calling out from the riverbank, "What is the name of your master?" "None," they replied, "we are all equals.

The Bill of Rights slipped quietly into the Constitution and passed from sight and public consciousness until given a new and very different life by the Supreme Court more than a century later.

One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen.

The idea of decline is no more, no less, correct than the idea of progress. History is neither progress nor decline alone. It is both. What is determinative in the historian's judgment is simply that aspect of the present he chooses to illuminate.