Quotes About History

The present was enough, though my work in the cemetery told me every day what happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough: it becomes your entire history.

White people covered the earth like lice.

Don't you want to be a U.S. citizen?" "What?" said Thomas. "We are citizens." "Vote? You already can vote?" "Sure, back in 1924 we got the vote. After the black man, after the women. But we got the vote.

You can't assimilate Indian ghosts. It's too late!

Loss, dislocation, disease, addiction, and just feeling like the tattered remnants of a people with a complex history. What was in that history? What sort of knowledge? Who had they been? What were they now? Why so much fucked-upness wherever you turned?

The Morgans were never litigious.

In December 1896, a humbled Carnegie at last consented to a sweeping deal.

Washington chose Wayne to lead a picked force of 1,350 infantry to mount a surprise raid against the new British outpost at Stony Point. The commander sketched out a plan to scale the 150-foot-high cliff overhanging the river, prompting Wayne, according to legend, to boast, "I'll storm hell, sir, if you'll make the plans!"21 To which Washington retorted drily, "Better try Stony Point first, general.

I remember how fascinated I was with his letters

In 1886, Standard Oil set up the Natural Gas Trust, with Rockefeller as its largest shareholder.

General John Cadwalader, who fired a ball through Conway's mouth that came out the back of his head.

if a white man kills a black, he cannot be tried for his life for the murder. . . . If a negro strikes a white man, he is punished with the loss of his hand and, if he should draw blood, with death.

Rockefeller's papers reveal that he and Standard Oil entered willingly into a staggering amount of corruption.

Perhaps never in financial history has anybody else amassed so much power so reluctantly.

In retrospect, it seems clear that the ambiguous signals from the White House reflected more than duplicity on Roosevelt's part

It is interesting to note in this context that Standard Oil of Ohio did not hire its first permanent black employee until 1906.

Fundada em 1746 para contrabalançar a influência da Igreja da Inglaterra, Princeton era um foco de posições presbiterianas e Whigs, pregava a liberdade religiosa e talvez parecesse uma escolha lógica para Hamilton.

Rockefeller was still held responsible for the sins of Standard Oil

On the night of April 18, 1775, eight hundred British troops marched out of Boston to capture Samuel Adams and John Hancock and seize a stockpile of patriot munitions in Concord.

The Second Continental Congress lacked many of the prerequisites of an authentic government—an army, a currency, taxing power—yet it evolved in pell-mell fashion into the first government of the United States.

May 12, 1784, the state legislature passed a law depriving most Loyalists of the vote for the next two years.

between 1789 and 1791, France basked in some sort of liberal pleasure garden before the erection of the guillotine is a complete fantasy.

BY the 1880s, as his health was fading

Rockefeller was embraced no less warmly by the New York Central, which was controlled by the Vanderbilt family.