American Historian Quotes

It may well be that men of science, not kings, or warriors, or even statesmen are to be the heroes of the future.

Charles A. Beard

The creation of Modern France through expansion goes back to the establishment of a small kingdom in the area around Paris in the late tenth century and was not completed until the incorporation of Nice and Savoy in 1860. The existing "hexagon" was the result of a long series of wars and conquests involving the triumph of French language and culture over what once were autonomous and culturally distinctive communities. The assimilation of Gascons, Savoyards, Occitans, Basques, and others helped to sustain the myth that French overseas expansionism in the nineteenth century, especially to North and West Africa, was a continuation of the same assimilationist project.

George M. Fredrickson

Unlike most readers in Antiquity who read their books aloud, we have developed the convention of reading silently. This lets us read more widely but often less well, especially when what we are reading-such as the plays of Shakespeare and Holy Scripture-is a body of oral material that has been, almost but not quite accidentally, captured in a book like a fly in amber.

Jaroslav Pelikan

And last, we must bear in mind that the relationships between perception, thought, emotion, and behavior are neither automatic nor consistent. In many cases they are demonstrably affected or directed by culture and socialization. We don't just want what we want because we want it; we want what we want because that's what we've learned to want.

Whoever would understand the character of Washington, in all its compass and grandeur, must learn it from his own writings, and from a complete history of his country during the long period in which he was the most prominent actor.

When he [the coyote] starts to move, it is with some deliberation. He prefers a dog-trot and often several shots from your rifle will not stir him into a run. He slips along easily and gracefully - a lean, hungrylooking wretch with all the insolence of a hoodlum and all the shrewdness of a thief.

John Charles Van Dyke

Since what unnumbered year
Hast thou kept watch and ward
And o'er the buried Land of Fear
So grimly held thy guard?

Henry Howard Brownell

We may sense that the river of black struggle is people, but it is also the hope, the movement, the transformative power that humans create and that create them, us, and makes them, us, new persons.

Vincent Harding

The prison life of the past looks in our own time like liberation itself.

Christopher Lasch

Only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed.

Why would scientists dedicated to uncovering the truth about the natural world deliberately misrepresent the work of their own colleagues? Why would they spread accusations with no basis? Why would they refuse to correct their arguments once they had been shown to be incorrect? And why did the press continue to quote them, year after year, even as their claims were shown, one after another, to be false?

Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.

Repeal is generally more difficult than original passage.

The renewals of the subjective approach to nature make a pathetic theme. Its ruins lie strewn like good intentions all along the ground traversed by science, until it survives only in strange corners like Lysenkoism [doctrine centered on belief in acquired characteristics] and anthroposophy, where nature is socialized or moralized.

Charles Coulston Gillispie

The boldness of his mind was sheathed in a scabbard of politeness.

Four hundred years is but a moment in 10,000 years. Time is curved, time is braided. Throw out your clocks.

Howard Mansfield

The light of Christ illuminates the laboratory, his speech is the fount of communication, he makes possible the study of humans in all their interactions, he is the source of all life, he provides the wherewithal for every achievement of human civilization, he is the telos of all that is beautiful. He is, among his many other titles, the Christ of the academic road.

Historically the buffalo had more influence on man than all other Plains animals combined. It was life, food, raiment, and shelter to the Indians. The buffalo and the Plains Indians lived together, and together passed away. The year 1876 marks practically the end of both.

Walter Prescott Webb

We must face the ultimate contradiction that our free and democratic society was made possible by massive slave labor.

David Brion Davis

Judaism as a religion offers the option of eating animal flesh, and most Jews do, but in our own country there has been a movement towards vegetarianism among very pious Jews.

Arthur Hertzberg

If the egalitarian wishes to realise his ideal, given the unpromising nature of his material, he might consider rendering all persons equally dead, for perhaps only thus could he eradicate any difference.

D. Michael Quinn

This use of animal terms to vilify and dehumanize the victims, combined with the abominably degraded conditions in the camps, made it easier for the SS to do their job, since treating prisoners like animals made them begin to look and smell like animals.

Charles Patterson (author)

It has often been said that modern nursing could not have developed independently of modern medicine, but... modern medicine could not have developed without the emergence of modern nursing.

The world changed while I slept, and much to my surprise, no one had consulted me.

As the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel warned years ago, to forget a holocaust is to kill twice.