Quotes About History

In the first six months of 1892 the city experienced nearly eight hundred violent deaths. Four a day.

THE SUBMARINE as a weapon had come a long way by this time, certainly to the point where it killed its own crews only rarely.

I think Rome at its worst had nothing on Chicago during those lurid days.

Speed Bonnie Boat.

No one had forgotten how in 1885 fouled water had ignited an outbreak of cholera and typhoid that killed ten percent of the city's population.

However strange or macabre some of the following incidents may seem, this is not a work of fiction.

Far from a clamor for war, there existed a widespread, if naive, belief that war of the kind that had convulsed Europe in past centuries had become obsolete—that the economies of nations were so closely connected with one another that even if a war were to begin, it would end quickly.

Damn those bloody Huns for breaking up an enjoyable party.

A single German submarine, Unterseeboot-9—U-9, for short—commanded by Kptlt. Otto Weddigen, had sunk all three ships, killing 1,459 British sailors, many of them young men in their teens.

failed Munich Agreement. Churchill, one of Chamberlain's foremost critics, called the agreement "a total and unmitigated defeat.

history is a lively abode, full of surprises.

If some of what follows challenges what you have come to believe about Churchill and this era, may I just say that history is a lively abode, full of surprises.

The story, too, tends to illustrate the end of the century.

With that as my guiding question, I set out on what became a lengthy journey through the vast and tangled forest of Churchill scholarship, a realm of giant volumes, distorted facts, and bizarre conspiracy theories, to try to find my personal Churchill. As I've discovered with prior books, when you look at the past through a fresh lens, you invariably see the world differently and find new material and insights even along well-trodden paths.

scarify, a six-hundred-year-old word that only Churchill would use in crucial diplomatic correspondence—" would scarify their names for a thousand years of history.

if the British Commonwealth and Empire lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'

As the crowd thundered, a man eased up beside a thin, pale woman with a bent neck. In the next instant Jane Addams realized her purse was gone. The great fair had begun.

The frontier may indeed have closed at last, as Frederick Jackson Turner proclaimed in his history-making speech at the fair, but for that moment it stood there glittering in the sun like the track of a spent tear.

The exposition went with Westinghouse, and helped change the history of electricity.

The Fringes of Power; the work

William Manchester and Paul Reid's Defender of the Realm, Roy Jenkins's Churchill, and Martin Gilbert's Finest Hour—but then to plunge

What could a Prime Minister at that time and in such desperate conditions say that was not pathetically inadequate—or even downright dangerous?" To Battersby, it typified "the uniquely unpredictable magic that was Churchill"—his ability to transform "the despondent misery of disaster into a grimly certain stepping stone to ultimate victory.

The Lusitania remained a passenger liner, but with the hull of a battleship.

During World War I, Germany had only 25 of its vaunted submarines sailing at any one time.