Quotes About History

In the annals of time, how many people had walked our earth as a sniper?

You know, you asked me about our lives during the "Great Depression." None of us called it that then. It was just hard times.

I went to Ohio University studying arts and history, and playing football. But I was only interested in girls, my pals and sports. I only did the minimum for school.

Reading church history and allowing it to influence our worldview reassures us not only that God has promised to be with us, but that he has delivered on this promise to every generation of believers regardless of the trials and tribulations of their time.

If we had had the right technology back then, you would have seen Eva Braun on the Donahue show and Adolf Hitler on Meet the Press.

Generally speaking, historically in this country, the care of a child has been thought of as female business.

I'm quite good at taking in information so I voraciously inhale Wikipedia - which may have some things wrong in it, but I think is generally more information than we had before. Last tour we didn't have Wikipedia. And then Discovery Channel and History Channel. I can take it in and retain what I think are the most important facts.

So the American government lied to the Native Americans for many, many years, and then President Clinton lied about a relationship, and everyone was surprised! A little naive, I feel!

So the American government lied to the Native Americans for many, many years, and then President Clinton lied about a relationship, and everyone was surprised! A little naïve, I feel!

Scrabble was invented by Nazis to piss off kids with dyslexia.

But, in the end, we have to allow this "innocent" idea of white America to die. It is irredeemable, but that does not mean we are too.

quotation from Maya Angelou emblazoned across the side of the building: "History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

How, what, and who we celebrate reflects what and who we value, and how we celebrate our past reflects ultimately who we take ourselves to be today.

thirty years after Baldwin's death we are still wrestling with the fact that so many Americans continue to hold the view that ours is a white nation.

The United States has always been shadowed by practices that contradict our most cherished principles. The genocide of native peoples, slavery, racial apartheid, Japanese internment camps, and the subordination of women reveal that our basic creed that "all men are created equal" was a lie, at least in practice.

Instead of confronting what we have done to bring us to such a moment, we forget, or as Baldwin put it, retreat into a "weird nostalgia," a longing for a time that never was. What was needed, he believed, was an unflinching confrontation with the ruins. That included confronting the ongoing terror and brutality of white supremacy.

The white southerner had to lie continuously to himself in order to justify his world.

Nell Painter spoke to the heart of the matter. "It's all about the questions we ask," she said. "The questions have changed. I mean, the questions always change. That's why we keep writing history.

tell my students at Princeton that it was just down the street, at a restaurant on Route 1, that Baldwin hurled a glass at a waitress and shattered a mirror after he was refused service and ended up having to run for his life.

Baldwin put it this way in No Name in the Street: "One may see that the history, which is now indivisible from oneself, has been full of errors and excesses; but this is not the same thing as seeing that, for millions of people, this history…has been nothing but an intolerable yoke, a stinking prison, a shrieking grave.

White people deserved whatever happened to them, he said. The problem is that we don't deserve any of it.

in the end, we have to allow this "innocent" idea of white America to die. It is irredeemable, but that does not mean we are too.

I think that much of this criticism fails to take seriously the continuity of themes running through Baldwin's body of work: that he continued to examine questions of American identity and history, railed against the traps of categories that narrowed our frames of reference, insisted that we reject the comfort and illusion of safety that the country's myths offered, and struggled mightily with the delicate balance between his advocacy and his art.

the idea that in America white lives have always mattered more than the lives of others, then the lie is a broad and powerful architecture of false assumptions by