Quotes About History

Le mythe est une parole choisie par l'histoire : il ne saurait surgir de la « nature » des choses.

History is hysterical: it is constituted only if we consider it, only if we look at it—and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it.

one can conceive of very ancient myths, but there are no eternal ones; for it is human history which converts reality into speech, and it alone rules the life and the death of mythical language. Ancient or not, mythology can only have an historical foundation, for myth is a type of speech chosen by history…

And yet, nothing can escape being put into question by History; not even good writing.

One fragment from Vis consists of a ski tip, under which there is a wedge-like protuberance. It is carved in the shape of an elk's head facing towards the rear.3 It was evidently designed as a brake to prevent slipping backwards – a forerunner of modern waxless cross-country skis.

We're a strange animal, so often destroying what we love for selfish ends, and yet tantalized by the sense that there are other choices if only we had strength to make them. In the politics of 400 years ago, we find the same questions we battle with today.

THE TABLECLOTH OF TURIN

Coates has effectively taken back this tarnished history and clarified the position of blacks in the fight against slavery. They are not passive victims waiting to be saved by enlightened whites. They are warriors, strategists and spies plotting their escape and struggling to remember everything. {from Charles' review of The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates]

Hamilton's relatively short life robbed him not only of any chance for further accomplishment but of the opportunity to mold his historical image.

One story, perhaps apocryphal, claims that when Hamilton was asked why the framers omitted the word God from the Constitution, he replied, "We forgot.

Walt Whitman, who ardently followed the Overland Campaign: "When did [Grant] ever turn back? He was not that sort; he could no more turn back than time! . . . Grant was one of the inevitables; he always arrived; he was invincible as a law: he never bragged—often seemed about to be defeated when he was in fact on the eve of a tremendous victory

For anyone studying Hamilton's pay book, it would come as no surprise that he would someday emerge as a first-rate constitutional scholar, an unsurpassed treasury secretary, and the protagonist of the first great sex scandal in American political history.

This thirty-five-page essay had been written in two or three weeks by Hamilton, as he entered the fray with all the grandiloquence and learning at his disposal. He showed himself proficient at elegant insults, an essential literary talent at the time, and possessing a precocious knowledge of history, philosophy, politics, economics, and law. In retrospect, it was clear that he had found his calling as a fearless, swashbuckling intellectual warrior who excelled in bare-knuckled controversy.

Unlike Jefferson, Hamilton never saw the creation of America as a magical leap across a chasm to an entirely new landscape, and he always thought the New World had much to learn from the Old.

he warned that progressive accumulation of debt "is perhaps the NATURAL DISEASE of all Governments. And it is not easy to conceive anything more likely than this to lead to great and convulsive revolutions of Empire.

It was probably at this point that a pregnant Eliza first smiled and shook hands with her husband's future executioner.

Of the nine American presidents who owned slaves—a list that includes his fellow Virginians Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe—only Washington set free all of his slaves.

Simon Wolf wrote during Woodrow Wilson's tenure, "President Grant did more on behalf of American citizens of Jewish faith at home and abroad than all the Presidents of the United States prior thereto or since.

In the words of Frederick Douglass, "That sturdy old Roman, Benjamin Butler, made the negro a contraband, Abraham Lincoln made him a freeman, and Gen. Ulysses S. Grant made him a citizen.

Had Napoleon been thoroughly unselfish, Grant suggested, he would have been the greatest man in history, such was his military genius. When a young woman on board asked Grant to name the two figures he detested most in history, he shot back, "Napoleon and Robespierre."114

It turned out that before he had stalked Garfield, Charles Guiteau had stalked Grant.

They promulgated a view of the Civil War as a righteous cause that had nothing to do with slavery but only states' rights—to which an incredulous James Longstreet once replied, "I never heard of any other cause of the quarrel than slavery.

Despite Grant's best efforts at Appomattox, the breach of the Civil War never healed but became deeply embedded in American political culture.

Americans today know little about the terrorism that engulfed the South during Grant's presidency. It has been suppressed by a strange national amnesia. The Klan's ruthless reign is a dark, buried chapter in American history. The Civil War is far better known than its brutal aftermath.