Quotes About History

The United States still had not escaped economic dependence on England, which consumed nearly half of American exports and accounted for three-quarters of American imports.

By 1872, under Grant's leadership, the Ku Klux Klan had been smashed in the South. (Its later twentieth-century incarnation had no connection to the earlier group other than a common style and ideology.)

Frederick Douglass paired Grant with Lincoln as the two people who had done most to secure African American advances:

At the Constitutional Convention, Elbridge Gerry had bawdily likened standing armies to a tumescent penis: "An excellent assurance of domestic tranquillity, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure.

So it may be said, with undoubted truth, that the whiskey drinkers made Mr. Jefferson the President of the United States.

old Abe is through with his next four years, we will put him [i.e., Grant]

Sensing an abandonment of Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass wondered what good abolition had been for the black man if "having been freed from the slaveholder's lash, he is to be subject to the slaveholder's shotgun?

Wherever our flag floats, it is the flag of slavery

Grant had overwhelmingly won the electoral vote, and had garnered the largest popular majority of the century, nearly 56 percent of the vote, the biggest percentage between Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt.

I trust . . . that the good sense of our countrymen will guard the public weal against this and every other innovation and that, altho[ugh] we may be a little wrong now and then, we shall return to the right path with more avidity." It was an accurate forecast of American history, both its tragic lapses and its miraculous redemptions.

established Yellowstone as the first national park on March 1, 1872. President Lincoln had signed a bill in 1864 that permitted California to preserve the Yosemite Valley and the giant sequoias of the Mariposa Grove, but it was Grant who initiated the modern national park system.

Far from hiding Black Jack, the irascible John Custis doted on him, and when the little boy was five, he submitted a petition to the governor to free the boy "christened John but commonly called Jack, born of the body of his Negro wench young Alice."19 To celebrate his emancipation, the boy was given four slaves as playmates.20 Obviously John Custis didn't rate very highly as a child psychologist.

At twenty-eight, he married a young widow, Martha Wayles Skelton, who inherited 135 slaves after her father's death. This loving ten-year marriage was marred by childhood mortality—only two of their six children reached maturity—and in September 1782 Martha herself died at thirty-four. Only thirty-nine at the time, Jefferson survived his wife

On September 17, 1787, after almost four months of hard-fought battles, the convention ended when thirty-nine delegates from twelve states signed the Constitution

His faculties stayed intact until about fifteen minutes before the end. Then, at 2:00 P.M. on Thursday, July 12, 1804, thirty-one hours after the duel, forty-nine-year-old Alexander Hamilton died gently, quietly, almost noiselessly.

This treasured gift retained a secret meaning for Eliza, for it had been a tacit gesture of solidarity from Washington when her husband was ensnared in the first major sex scandal in American history. The

Patrick Henry, the leading antifederalist, warned delegates who supported the Constitution, "They'll free your niggers.

Like the London merchant bankers, the early Jewish bankers on Wall Street had started out as dry-goods merchants: the Lehmans began as Alabama cotton brokers; Goldman, as the owner of a Pennsylvania clothing store, Kuhn and Loeb, as Cincinnati clothiers; and Lazard, in a New Orleans dry-goods business.

In the standard telling of his life, Hamilton boards a ship in October 1772 and sails off to North America forever.

By an exquisite (and, for Bill, surely excruciating) irony, this scheming, selfish, money-mad charlatan turned his back on his family just as his eldest son began to amass the largest fortune in history.

Congress adopted the dollar as the official monetary unit in 1785, but for many years New York shopkeepers still quoted prices in pounds, shillings, and pence.

Hamilton probably spent little more than two years at King's and never formally graduated due to the outbreak of the Revolution. By April 6, 1776, King's College, tarred by its earlier association with Myles Cooper, was commandeered by patriot forces and put to use as a military hospital.

When the sixty-nine electors met on February 4, 1789, they voted unanimously for Washington, who became the first president, and cast only thirty-four ballots for Adams, who came in second and thus became vice president.

Pierpont's anti-Semitism was well known.