Quotes About History

They were presented to Louis XV, who installed them in his museum, the Cabinet du Roi. Decades later, maps of the Ohio River valley were still largely blank, except for the Endroit où on a trouvé des os d'Éléphant—the "place where the elephant bones were found." (Today the "place where the elephant bones were found" is a state park in Kentucky known as Big Bone Lick.) Longueuil's bones confounded everyone who examined them.

Then he took me to look at the Maastricht animal, still today one of the world's most famous fossils. (Though the Netherlands has repeatedly asked for it back, the French have held on to it for more than two hundred years.)

Lyell became something of a celebrity—the Steven Pinker of his generation—and

The modern humans "replaced" the archaic humans, which is a nice way of saying they drove them to extinction.

Though it might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature, it's not clear that he ever really did.

By burning through coal and oil deposits, humans are putting carbon back into the air that has been sequestered for tens—in most cases hundreds—of millions of years. In the process, we are running geologic history not only in reverse but at warp speed.

In fact, the American Mastodon vanished around thirteen thousand years ago. Its demise was part of a wave of disappearances that has come to be known as the megafauna extinction. This wave coincided with the spread of modern humans and, increasingly, is understood to have been a result of it. In this sense, the crisis Cuvier discerned just beyond the edge of recorded history was us.

In a similar vein, Jared Diamond has observed: "Personally, I can't fathom why Australia's giants should have survived innumerable droughts in their tens of millions of years of Australian history, and then have chosen to drop dead almost simultaneously (at least on a time scale of millions of years) precisely and just coincidentally when the first humans arrived.

For me, Dracula has always been associated with travel and beautiful historical places.

As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it. And it is not only reaching back that endangers us; sometimes history itself reaches inexorably forward for us with its shadowy claws.

The thing that most haunted me that day, however...was the fact that these things had - apparently - actually occurred...For all his attention to my historical education, my father had neglected to tell me this: history's terrible moments were real. I understand now, decades later, that he could never have told me. Only history itself can convince you of such a truth. And once you've seen that truth - really seen it - you can't look away.

As you know, human history is full of evil deeds, and maybe we ought to think of them with tears, not fascination.

No plough iron ever cut this-here hill afore, not in the whole time of man,' Henry said.

Many of the names on the gravestones are also the names of town roads, which reminded me of my long-ago childhood, when these roads were essentially long unpaved driveways named for the people whose farms were at the ends of them.

Ordinary-size people, they don't know: their lives have been rehearsed and rehearsed by every single person who ever lived before them, inventions and improvements and unimportant notions each generation, each year. In 600BC somebody did something that makes your life easier today; in 1217, 1892.

History remembers the velvet hearted.

No generation is ever spontaneous. We are none of us our own kind.

But what about the horses? Have they always had horses here?" "Probably. Colonial words usually have horses; they're cheap local transportation,self-replicating.

A sly smirk curled at the corner of his mouth as he peered into the trunk. "Why do you have Robin Hood's toy chest?" - Brendan Daniels

I had a great drama teacher in high school, and that's when I started to learn about the history of theater.

it was at Pompeii, nonetheless, that archaeology was born. It was to come of age in Egypt. Once

There are too many people in the world as it is, but the supply of ancient manuscripts is severely limited.

United States.

You begin following the news in the papers, just like your dad does. Germany is not alone in preparing for war. In 1936 Italy and Japan join with Germany to form the Axis Powers. Italy, under its dictator, Benito Mussolini, wages war in Africa. In Asia, Japan is invading China. In 1938 you read about the German Army's march into Austria. The next September you hear that 1.5 million German troops attacked Poland and claimed that nation for Germany.