Quotes About History

Ma had been very fashionable, before she married Pa, and a dressmaker had made her clothes.

That's the noise that made the Redcoats run! Mr. Paddock said to Father. Maybe, Father said, tugging his beard. But it was muskets that won the Revolution. And don't forget it was axes and plows that made this country. That's so, come to think of it, Mr. Paddock said.

Popcorn is American. Nobody but the Indians ever had popcorn, till after the Pilgrim Fathers came to America. On

the old Virginia shore. So carry

The past was worth remembering and knowing in its own right. It was not behind us, never truly behind us, but under us, holding us up, a foundation for all that was to come and everything that had ever been.

Baltimore. It's imperfect. Boy, is it imperfect. And there are parts of its past that make you wince. It's not all marble steps and waitresses calling you 'hon,' you know. Racial strife in the sixties, the riots during the Civil War. F. Scott Fitzgerald said it was civilized and gay, rotted and polite. The terms are slightly anachronistic now, but I think he was essentially right.

No self-respecting gastronome was going to look back on the 1950s with anything except pity. •

she quickly hired a housekeeper and a kitchen staff for the White House and then threw herself into what mattered far more to her—civil rights, women's equality, poverty, housing, employment, and the war. She was the busiest, most public, most productive First Lady in history, and complaints about dinner just didn't register. But

Many dinners emerging from the scientific kitchen were entirely white…

The characteristic sweetness of much American cooking was also established during these years, as cooks relied more and more on the blandness and general acceptability of sugar as a flavoring.

Like the food experts of the last century, today's enthusiasts are fully convinced they have rescued food from the barbarous prisons of the past.

Julia's attitude toward British food—that it was inedible, that it had little relevant history apart from being inedible, and that a more sensible population would simply take its meals in France—had been locked into place for a long time, and no respectable gourmand would have contradicted her.

If I tell you something Leah, can you keep a secret? Conor pressed a callused finger across a petroglyph of a deer like a blind man etching memory into his brain.

big house to the slave quarters was nothing short of miraculous as far as

Once upon a time wasn't as long ago as it used to be.

Indian, as in American Indian.

I'd once asked Jean-Claude what they called Renfields before the release of the book Dracula in 1897. Jean-Claude had said, "Slaves." He'd probably been kidding, but I'd never had the heart to ask again. The

We onlies, we fear the nothing. We fear the winds that howl around the last one standing. We fear the black silence of carrying those ever-fading histories alone.

The history of Courcelles is one well known within the annals of chivalry. Across these fields the Merovingian kings fought their battles. From this castle did the Lord of Courcelles sally forth on Crusade with his retinue of knights. And it was here, as legend has it, that the Demoiselle of Courcelles, the first of that name, Lady Melisande, brought the blessed Dame of Orleans, none other than Jeanne d'Arc, and besought her lord to follow the saint into battle for the glory of France.

Oh, no," said Mr. Fitzhugh blithely, immune to nuance. "We're here to see the ruins." Lady Vaughn looked innocently up at her husband. "Isn't that what you said, Vaughn?

embroidered Louis XV chair, legs crossed at the

Of all the weapons the Europeans brought to the Pacific, guns included, none was more powerful and more capable of effecting lasting change than written language.

Europeans knew little about the ocean beyond latitude 27°N, marked by Cape Bojador in West Africa.

Michel and Annette Muller's mother, snatched from her children at Beaune-la-Rolande, died at Auschwitz. And while it was the Nazis who wished her dead, it was the French who put her in harm's way.