American Historian Quotes

An androgynous mind was not a male mind. It was a mind attuned to the full range of human experience, including the invisible lives of women.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Before the first World War women were arrested for smoking cigarettes in public, for using profanity, for appearing on beaches without stockings, for driving automobiles without a man beside them, for wearing outlandish attire for example, shorts

Geoffrey Perret

I take great satisfaction in seeing people and organizations achieve goals they might have originally believed to be beyond their reach.

For historians, hindsight can be a treacherous ally. Enabling us to trace the hidden patterns of past events, it beguiles us with the mirage of inevitability, the assumption that different outcomes lay beyond the limits of the possible.

No one thinks Las Vegas is real; it is illusion, but visitors willingly suspend disbelief and pretend.

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

In Philadelphia, Philadelphians feel, the Right Thing is more natural and more firmly bred into [them] than anywhere else.

Stephen Birmingham

To say that a man is made up of certain chemical elements is a satisfactory description only for those who intend to use him as a fertilizer.

Herbert J. Muller

The Jews emerge into history, not a nation of keen spiritual aspirations and altruistic ethics, but that pagan people, worshipping rocks, sheep and cattle, and spirits of caves and wells, of whom the Old Testament, tending towards its higher ideal, gives fragmentary but convincing evidence.

James T. Shotwell

But before and after the Mongol upheaval, the Khazars sent many offshoots into the unsubdued Slavonic lands, helping ultimately to build up the great Jewish centers of eastern Europe.

Salo Wittmayer Baron

Some have considered such photographs as evidence that Eakins, if not homosexual or bisexual, was at least homoerotic. But the artist would undoubtedly have done the same thing with his women students if such a thing had been possible.

Gordon Hendricks

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

Howard Mansfield

The Greek in me wanted to know what it felt like to pull an oar. The intellectual wondered about how to get eight individuals to move to the same beat. The athlete wanted to check what has been described as the ultimate workout. The romantic craved seeing if the quirkiness of the sport - there is after all, little practical value to oarsmanship in the postindustrial age - stirred his blood.

Barry S. Strauss

In the luxuriance of a bowl of grapes set out in ritual display, in a bottle of wine, the soil and sunshine of California reached millions for whom that distant place would henceforth be envisioned as a sun-graced land resplendent with the goodness of the fruitful earth.

Teaching is too vital an occupation to be left to the lazy or greedy or negative

Eliot Wigginton

Nationalism is a state of mind permeating the large majority of the people and claiming to permeate all its members; it recognises the nation-State as the ideal form of political organization and the nationality as the source of all creative cultural energy and economic well-being. The supreme loyalty of man is therefore due to his nationality, as his own life is supposedly rooted in and made possible by its welfare.

To know the truth of history is to realize its ultimate myth and its inevitable ambiguity.

You can prove anything by statistics, if you can only choose your statistics and stop when you want to. But statistics are like automobiles. Sometimes if you hitch yourself up with a statistic, you meet the fate of the farmer who put his fool head in the yoke with a skittish steer.

Food, medicine, beauty, and love. When we talk about them in English,
they seem so different from each other. But looking at them from
another perspective, they are not so different. Good food is a part of
good health. Good health leads to good looks. Love surrounds it all.
When we feed or heal, we share love. When we love and are loved, we
are beautiful.

Alma Hogan Snell

Truth requires a maximum effort to see through the eyes of strangers, foreigners, and enemies.

The entire banking movement, at all crucial stages, was centralized in the hands of a few men who for years were linked, ideologically and personally, with one another.

It is a form of generational narcissism to change texts to suit one's own needs.

Luke Timothy Johnson

We all know what feminists are. They are shrill, overly aggressive, man-hating, ball-busting, selfish, hairy, extremist, deliberately unattractive women with absolutely no sense of humor who see sexism at every turn. They make men's testicles shrivel up to the size of peas, they detest the family and think all children should be deported or drowned.

Susan J. Douglas

It is clear that history differs from the other disciplines in having
an approach and not an area of its own.

Leonard Krieger

The peoples of Europe are a work in progress and always must be... The history of the people of Europe has not ended — it never will. Ethnogenesis is a process of the present and future as much as it is the past. No efforts of romantics, politicians, or social scientists can preserve once and for all some essential soul of a people or nation. Nor can any effort ensure that nations, ethnic groups, and communities of today will not vanish utterly in the future. The past may have set the parameters within which one can build the future, but it cannot determine what that future must be.

Patrick J. Geary