Quotes About History

established under Magna Carta was the right to a trial by jury. For centuries, guilt or innocence had been determined, across Europe, either by a trial by ordeal—a trial by water, for instance, or a trial by fire—or by trial by combat. Trials by ordeal and

A ROBOT COMPUTER WILL GIVE CBS THE FASTEST REPORTING IN HISTORY," read the headline.31 The UNIVAC would stay in Philadelphia—it was too big to move—but in New York, CBS would install a fake, a console lit, from the inside, by a string of Christmas lights. The first computer most Americans ever saw was an empty shell: a stunt.

Jane Francklyne, born in 1565, had lived for less than a month. She left very little behind. She was buried in the Ecton churchyard, but her father would hardly have paid a carver to engrave so small a stone. If not for the parish register, there would be no record that this Jane Francklyne had ever lived at all. History is what is written and can be found; what isn't saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by the earth.

Remember that very few stories are of great interest without the rustle of a skirt.

As the years passed, and Madison grew old, he observed how many other nations had followed the United States' lead and written their own constitutions: France, Haiti, Poland, the Netherlands, Switzerland. By 1820, at least sixty constitutions had been written in Europe alone; eighty more would be written by 1850. Very few of those constitutions lasted.18

Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

Of the more than two hundred black churches and homes that had been bombed in the South since 1948, more bombs had gone off in Birmingham than in any other city.

Instead, the legislature passed new laws banning the teaching of slaves to read and write, and prohibiting, too, teaching slaves about the Bible.43 In a nation founded on a written Declaration, made sacred by evangelicals during a religious revival, reading about equality became a crime.

The turn from reverence to inquiry, from mystery to history, was crucial to the founding of the United States.

Cities and counties in the North and West passed racial zoning laws, banning blacks from the middle-class communities. In 1890, in Montana, blacks lived in all fifty-six counties in the state; by 1930, they'd been confined to just eleven.

understanding history as a form of inquiry—not as something easy or comforting but as something demanding and exhausting—was central to the nation's founding.

In Norfolk, Virginia, four thousand slaves—who, living in a border state that was not part of the Confederacy, were not actually freed by the Emancipation Proclamation—

Masculine systems."77 That women were left out of the nation's founding documents, and out of its founders' idea of civil society, considered, like slaves, to be confined to a state of nature, would trouble the political order for centuries.

Before 1919, Mexicans who entered the United States at the border did not need to apply for entry.

The telling of history is, by its very nature, controversial, contentious, and contested; it advances by debate. This doesn't make history squishy, vague, and irrelevant. It makes it picky, demanding, and vital.

To study the past is to unlock the prison of the present.

There were about three million people on that island, land of mountains, when Columbus landed; fifty years later, there were only five hundred; everyone else had died, their songs unsung.

Massachusetts's poor laws required that boys be taught to write and girls to read.7

In Louisiana, black voter registration dropped from 130,000 in 1898 to 5,300 in 1908, and to 730 in 1910.

Fiction is the history of the obscure.

every age has its folly

The United States was founded during the most secular era in American history, either before or since. In the late eighteenth century, church membership was low, and anticlerical feeling was high. It is no accident that the Constitution does not mention God.

To treat the founding documents as Scripture would be to become a slave to the past.

When I reached this policeman in the street, he hit me over the head with his club...I wanted to get protection, but instead the cops hit me...I was afraid to run, because I knew if I did they would hit me again. Harry Reed's affidavit is dated August 22, 1900. And little has changed in a century.