Quotes About History

Briery Swamp slept. And May Ellen Bird, only a baby after all, who did not know the strange history of her town or even the name of it yet, was blissfully unaware that it slept with one eye open.

Ferdinand Magellan reached the western edge in 1520, confirming for the first time that the earth was flat.

Black culture and history as something worthy of study, and to replace the "n-word" with "Brother" and "Sister." You see, the "n-word" was not some reclamation of Black community; it was part of a process of dehumanization required by chattel slavery. We weren't human beings; we were n*****. I have not used the word since walking into M. Navies' class. I was 13 years old." - Melina Abdullah

I have to say it's the most sizzling, delicious, sublime kiss ever. In the history of human beings. Possibly back to and including dinosaurs.

History is littered with dead good men.

One should learn the lessons of history. The mistakes of the past need only be made once. Unless there are no other choices. ~ Bayaz

Names turned over by time, like the plough turning the soil. Bringing up the new while the old were buried in the mud.

The seeds of the past bear fruit in the present,

But things are always going to be better, or were better long ago. No politician ever got anywhere by telling people things are just right as they are.

No one cares about the past any more,' he whispered. 'They don't see that you can't have a future without a past.' How

When I'd headed out here on my wedding day, I hadn't realized I'd bought a ticket to my own history, a different one from studying Akh-en-aten and Horizon-of-the-Aten, maybe, but a living, ongoing one.

New Jersey, in 1844, became the last state to add the qualifying male to citizen, and women who had been voting all along could not vote anymore.

what are the effects of Victorian India providing the quintessential form of imperial sovereignty when such stark evidence should lead to other sites and in other directions? What imperial history is being rehearsed with this model in mind when more gradated forms of sovereignty have been equally effective and pervasive (think of Morocco, Palestine, Puerto Rico, and Vieques) and make up not the exception to imperial governance but such a widespread norm?

What has long made the U.S. military base of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean a "secret history," or the nuclear test sites that have ravaged large swaths of reservation land in the United States a "Native American problem," or consigned the Mariana Islands as outside the field of (post)colonial work? Why have these not been considered nodal points of an imperial history rather than grist for the case that the U.S. remains an imperial exception?

One task is to identify what for some time I have referred to as the "epistemic politics" that often sever colonial pasts from their contemporary translations

I look to Agent Orange—the spreading of twenty million gallons of deadly herbicides across Vietnam by U.S. forces from 1961 to 1971—long studied as part of the history of warfare and combat zones and as environmental history but rarely joined with the enduring violence of compounded forms of imperial governance. It is far from the only one.

see the interview done by Valentine Daniel for Public Culture (24, no. 3 [Fall 2012]: 487–508).

colonial entailments do not have a life of their own. They wrap around contemporary problems; adhere in the logics of governance; are plaited through racialized distinctions; and hold tight to the less tangible emotional economies of humiliations, indignities, and resentments

Connectivities to those colonial histories that bear on the present can escape scrutiny: some of those that are most pressing evade recognition. I ask why and how that may be so.

When she's anxious, she replays moments from her life, perhaps to convince herself that she has a history.

You and your sisters have so many reference points, such a dense history," William said. "I never get used to it.

You and your sisters have so many reference points, such a dense history,

they're contained in their bodies, in the biographical facts of their lives.

The past gets carried with us. It's always there.