Historians Small Quotes

Want and intelligence,’ the historian had written, ‘is a dangerous combination.

History and societies do not crawl. They make jumps. They go from fracture to fracture, with a few vibrations in between. Yet we (and historians) like to believe in the predictable, small incremental progression.

Very often history is a means of denying the past. Denying the past is to refuse to recognise its integrity. To fit it, force it, function it, to suck out the spirit until it looks the way you think it should. We are all historians in our small way.

Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain - which is to say, all of it. Every last bit of it, good and bad - Marmite, village fetes, country lanes, people saying 'mustn't grumble' and 'I'm terribly sorry but', people apologizing to me when I conk them with a nameless elbow, milk in bottles, beans on toast, haymaking in June, stinging nettles, seaside piers, Ordnance Survey maps, crumpets, hot-water bottles as a necessity, drizzly Sundays - every bit of it. What a wondrous place this was - crazy as fuck, of course, but adorable to the tiniest degree. What other country, after all, could possibly have come up with place names like Tooting Bec and Farleigh Wallop, or a game like cricket that goes on for three days and never seems to start? Who else would think it not the least odd to make their judges wear little mops on their heads, compel the Speaker of the House of Commons to sit on something called the Woolsack, or take pride in a military hero whose dying wish was to be kissed by a fellow named Hardy? ('Please Hardy, full on the lips, with just a bit of tongue.') What other nation in the world could possibly have given us William Shakespeare, pork pies, Christopher Wren, Windsor Great Park, the Open University, Gardners' Question Time and the chocolate digestive biscuit? None, of course. How easily we lose sight of all this. What an enigma Britain will seem to historians when they look back on the second half of the twentieth century. Here is a country that fought and won a noble war, dismantled a mighty empire in a generally benign and enlightened way, created a far-seeing welfare state - in short, did nearly everything right - and then spent the rest of the century looking on itself as a chronic failure. The fact is that this is still the best place in the world for most things - to post a letter, go for a walk, watch television, buy a book, venture out for a drink, go to a museum, use the bank, get lost, seek help, or stand on a hillside and take in a view. All of this came to me in the space of a lingering moment. I've said it before and I'll say it again. I like it here. I like it more than I can tell you.

I shall relate quite simply how things happened and without adding anything of my own, which is no small feat for an historian.

Any battle-seasoned general will tell you that, even in a small-scale engagement (as this one was), there always comes a point where coherence breaks down, and the narrative flow, and any real sense of how things are going. These matters are re-created by historians later on. The need to re-create the myth of coherence may be one of the reasons why history exists in the first place.

I think most historians would agree that the part played by impulses of selfish, individual aggression in the holocausts of history was small; first and foremost, the slaughter was meant as an offering to the gods, to king and country, or the future happiness of mankind. The crimes of a Caligula shrink to insignificance compared to the havoc wrought by Torquemada. The number of victims of robbers, highwaymen, rapists, gangsters and other criminals at any period of history is negligible compared to the massive numbers of those cheerfully slain in the name of the true religion, just policy or correct ideology. Heretics were tortured and burnt not in anger but in sorrow, for the good of their immortal souls. Tribal warfare was waged in the purported interest of the tribe, not of the individual. Wars of religion were fought to decide some fine point in theology or semantics. Wars of succession dynastic wars, national wars, civil wars, were fought to decide issues equally remote from the personal self-interest of the combatants. Let me repeat: the crimes of violence committed for selfish, personal motives are historically insignificant compared to those committed ad majorem gloriam Dei, out of a self-sacrificing devotion to a flag, a leader, a religious faith or a political conviction. Man has always been prepared not only to kill but also to die for good, bad or completely futile causes. And what can be a more valid proof of the reality of the self-transcending urge than this readiness to die for an ideal?

You are fond of history! And so are Mr. Allen and my father; and I have two brothers who do not dislike it. So many instances within my small circle of friends is remarkable! At this rate, I shall not pity the writers of history any longer. If people like to read their books, it is all very well, but to be at so much trouble in filling great volumes, which, as I used to think, nobody would willingly ever look into, to be labouring only for the torment of little boys and girls, always struck me as a hard fate; and though I know it is all very right and necessary, I have often wondered at the person's courage that could sit down on purpose to do it.

I learned early on that war forms its own culture. The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years. It is peddled by mythmakers- historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists, and the state- all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty.

That feeling stayed with me for months. In fact, I had grown so accustomed to that floating feeling that I started to panic at the prospect of losing it. So I began to ask friends, theologians, historians, pastors I knew, nuns I liked, *What am I going to do when it's gone?* And they knew exactly what I meant because they had either felt it themselves or read about it in great works of Christian theology. St. Augustine called it "the sweetness." Thomas Aquinas called it something mystical like "the prophetic light." But all said yes, it will go. The feelings will go. The sense of God's presence will go. There will be no lasting proof that God exists. There will be no formula for how to get it back. But they offered me this small bit of certainty, and I clung to it. When the feelings recede like the tides, they said, they will leave an imprint. I would somehow be marked by the presence of an unbidden God.

A small percentage of medieval bodies were buried such; historians thought they were the graves of suicides or witches, though really, historians were such Guesser McGuessers, him the biggest of them all.

As a historian, I confess to a certain amusement when I hear the Judeo-Christian tradition praised as the source of our concern for human rights. In fact, the great religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights in the contemporary sense. They were notorious not only for acquiescence in poverty, inequality, exploitation and oppression but for enthusiastic justifications of slavery, persecution, abandonment of small children, torture, genocide.

I cannot see the war as historians see it. Those clever fellows study all the facts and they see the war as a large thing, one of the biggest events in the legend of the man, something general, involving multitudes. I see it as a large thing too, only I break it into small units of one man at a time, and see it as a large and monstrous thing for each man involved. I see the war as death in one form or another for men dressed as soldiers, and all the men who survived the war, including myself, I see as men who died with their brothers, dressed as soldiers. There is no such thing as a soldier. I see death as a private event, the destruction of the universe in the brain and in the senses of one man, and I cannot see any man's death as a contributing factor in the success or failure of a military campaign.

I do not write every day. I write to the questions and issues before me. I write to deadlines. I write out of my passions. And I write to make peace with my own contradictory nature. For me, writing is a spiritual practice. A small bowl of water sits on my desk, a reminder that even if nothing is happening on the page, something is happening in the room--evaporation. And I always light a candle when I begin to write, a reminder that I have now entered another realm, call it the realm of the Spirit. I am mindful that when one writes, one leaves this world and enters another. My books are collages made from journals, research, and personal experience. I love the images rendered in journal entries, the immediacy that is captured on the page, the handwritten notes. I love the depth of ideas and perspective that research brings to a story, be it biological or anthropological studies or the insights brought to the page by the scholarly work of art historians. When I go into a library, I feel like I am a sleuth looking to solve a mystery. I am completely inspired by the pursuit of knowledge through various references. I read newpapers voraciously. I love what newspapers say about contemporary culture. And then you go back to your own perceptions, your own words, and weigh them against all you have brought together. I am interested in the kaleidoscope of ideas, how you bring many strands of thought into a book and weave them together as one piece of coherent fabric, while at the same time trying to create beautiful language in the service of the story. This is the blood work of the writer. Writing is also about a life engaged. And so, for me, community work, working in the schools or with grassroots conservation organizations is another critical component of my life as a writer. I cannot separate the writing life from a spiritual life, from a life as a teacher or activist or my life intertwined with family and the responsibilities we carry within our own homes. Writing is daring to feel what nurtures and breaks our hearts. Bearing witness is its own form of advocacy. It is a dance with pain and beauty.

At the end of things we turn into historians. Sometimes happy, sometimes nostalgic, sometimes regretful or bitter, sometimes to reassure ourselves that we have amounted to something, however small. And sometimes, as I am doing now, to try with the wisdom of hindsight to make sense of ourselves.

As the historian Jocelyn Penny Small pointed out, GODISNOWHERE comes out a lot differently when rendered as GOD IS NOW HERE versus GOD IS NOWHERE.

Isn’t it complicated to be human, though?” she said. “Animals seem to give up their lives so naturally…And after all, I grew up, I married John, I had Debby. So knowing, being able to understand and forecast and even predict an approximate date, shouldn’t make any difference. I guess consciousness makes individuals of us, and as individuals we lose the old acceptance…” “The one thing,” Marian said in a voice that went suddenly small and tight, “the thing I can hardly bear sometimes is that I won’t ever see her grow up. She’ll have to do it without whatever I could have given her.” “Time, too, time and everything that one could do in it, and the chance of wasting or losing or never even realizing it. It’s so important to us because we see it so close. We’re individuals, we’re full of ourselves, and so we’re bad historians. We get crazy and anxious because all of sudden there’s so little time left to be loving and generous as we wish we’d always been and always intended to be…do you suppose I feel the shortness of time because I want to experience everything and feel everything that the race has ever felt? Because there’s so much to feel and I’m greedy?

It was her only room, I now saw, trying not to look around too conspicuously—it served as her kitchen, bedroom, and sitting area. It was immaculately clean, the narrow bed in one corner made up with a white quilt and ornamented with several white pillows embroidered in bright colors. Next to the bed stood a table that held a book, a lamp with a glass chimney, and a pair of eyeglasses, and beside that a small chair. At the foot of the bed was a wooden chest, painted with flowers. The kitchen area, where we sat, consisted of a simple cookstove and a table and chairs. There was no electricity, nor was there a bathroom (I learned about the outhouse in the back garden only later in the visit). On one wall hung a calendar with a photograph of workers in a factory, and on another wall hung a piece of embroidery in red and white. There were flowers in a jar and white curtains at the windows. A tiny woodstove stood near the kitchen table, with sticks of wood piled next to it.

Many historians, many sociologists and psychologists have written at lenght, and with deep concern, about the price that Western man has had to pay and will go on paying for technological progress. They point out, for example, that democracy can be hardly expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized.But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralisation of power. As the machinery of mass production is made more efficient it tends to become more complex and more expensive - and so less available to the eterpriser of limited means. Moreover, mass production cannot work without mass distribution; but mass distribution raises problems which only the largest producers can satisfactorily solve. In a world of mass production and mass distribution the Little Man, with his inadequate stock of working capital, is at a grave disadvantage. In competition with Big Man, he loses his money and finally his very existence as an independent producer; the Big Man has grobbled him up. As the Little Men disappear, more and more economic power comes to be wielded by fewer and fewer people. Under a dictatorship the Big Business, made possible by advancing technology and the consequent ruin of Little Business, is controlled by the State - that is to say, by small group of party leaders and soldiers, policemen and civil servants who carry out their orders.

If we think of eroticism not as sex per se, but as a vibrant, creative energy, it’s easy to see that Stephanie’s erotic pulse is alive and well. But her eroticism no longer revolves around her husband. Instead, it’s been channeled to her children. There are regular playdates for Jake but only three dates a year for Stephanie and Warren: two birthdays, hers and his, and one anniversary. There is the latest in kids’ fashion for Sophia, but only college sweats for Stephanie. They rent twenty G-rated movies for every R-rated movie. There are languorous hugs for the kids while the grown-ups must survive on a diet of quick pecks. This brings me to another point. Stephanie gets tremendous physical pleasure from her children. Let me be perfectly clear here: she knows the difference between adult sexuality and the sensuousness of caring for small children. She, like most mothers, would never dream of seeking sexual gratification from her children. But, in a sense, a certain replacement has occurred. The sensuality that women experience with their children is, in some ways, much more in keeping with female sexuality in general. For women, much more than for men, sexuality exists along what the Italian historian Francesco Alberoni calls a “principle of continuity.” Female eroticism is diffuse, not localized in the genitals but distributed throughout the body, mind, and senses. It is tactile and auditory, linked to smell, skin, and contact; arousal is often more subjective than physical, and desire arises on a lattice of emotion. In the physicality between mother and child lie a multitude of sensuous experiences. We caress their silky skin, we kiss, we cradle, we rock. We nibble their toes, they touch our faces, we lick their fingers, let them bite us when they’re teething. We are captivated by them and can stare at them for hours. When they devour us with those big eyes, we are besotted, and so are they. This blissful fusion bears a striking resemblance to the physical connection between lovers. In fact, when Stephanie describes the early rapture of her relationship with Warren—lingering gazes, weekends in bed, baby talk, toe-nibbling—the echoes are unmistakable. When she says, “At the end of the day, I have nothing left to give,” I believe her. But I also have come to believe that at the end of the day, there may be nothing more she needs. All this play activity and intimate involvement with her children’s development, all this fleshy connection, has captured Stephanie’s erotic potency to the detriment of the couple’s intimacy and sexuality. This is eros redirected. Her sublimated energy is displaced onto the children, who become the centerpiece of her emotional gratification.

Grant deserves an honored place in American history, second only to Lincoln for what he did for the freed slaves. He got the big issues right during his presidency even if he bungled many of the small ones. The historian Richard N. Currant who also saw Grant as the most underrated American president wrote “by backing radical reconstruction as best he could he made a greater effort to secure the constitutional rights of blacks than did any other president between Lincoln and Lyndon B. Johnson”. In the words of Frederick Douglass, “that sturdy old roman, Benjamin Butler, made the negro a contraband, Abraham Lincoln made him a free man and General Ulysses S. Grant made him a citizen”.

Historians tell a story about Abraham Lincoln, that while returning to Washington from Springfield, he forced his entire party to stop to help some small birds he saw in distress. When chided by the others, he responded, quite plainly, “I could not have slept to-night if I had left those poor creatures on the ground and not restored them to their mother.

What is the purpose of education? Is it to impart knowledge and facts or is it to nurture curiosity, effortful problem solving, and the capacity for lifelong learning? Educational historians have repeatedly shown that today’s schools were designed during the first half of the twentieth century to meet the demands of the industrial era, not an innovative knowledge economy. “Very few schools teach students how to create knowledge,” says Professor Keith Sawyer of Washington University, a leading education and innovation researcher. “Instead, students are taught that knowledge is static and complete, and they become experts at consuming knowledge rather than producing knowledge.” This is unacceptable. Change

The failure to take seriously what the Nazis themselves said is comprehensible enough. There is hardly an aspect of contemporary history more irritating and mystifying than the fact that of all the great unsolved political questions of our century, it should have been this seemingly small and unimportant Jewish problem that had the dubious honor of setting the whole infernal machine in motion. Such discrepancies between cause and effect outrage our common sense, to say nothing of the historian’s sense of balance and harmony. Compared with the events themselves, all explanations of antisemitism look as if they had been hastily and hazardously contrived, to cover up an issue which so gravely threatens our sense of proportion and our hope for sanity.

History-writing to-day has passed into an Alexandrian age, where criticism has overpowered creation. Faced by the mountainous heap of the minutiae of knowledge and awed by the watchful severity of his colleagues, the modern historian too often takes refuge in learned articles or narrowly specialized dissertations, small fortresses that are easy to defend from attack. His work can be of the highest value; but it is not an end in itself. I believe that the supreme duty of the historian is to write history, that is to say, to attempt to record in one sweeping sequence the greater events and movements that have swayed the destinies of man. The writer rash enough to make the attempt should not be criticized for his ambition, however much he may deserve censure for the inadequacy of his equipment or the inanity of his results.

In this tiny interval of the twenty-first century, we, the human species, will either learn to become a life-enhancing element within the greater Earth community . . . or we will not. If we fail, humanity will be reduced to a small number, we will have forsaken our potential as a species (this time around, at least) and we will have perpetrated the extinction of many thousands of species, perhaps millions — beyond those that have already perished at our hands. And yet we now behold the possibility of a radical and foundational shift in human culture — from a suicidal, life-destroying element to a way of life worthy of our unique human potential and of Earth's dream for itself. What lies before us is the opportunity and imperative for a thorough cultural transformation — what eco-philosopher Joanna Macy calls the Great Turning, the transition from an egocentric “Industrial Growth Society” to a soulcentric “Life-sustaining Society,” or what economist David Korten in The Great Turning calls the transition “from Empire to Earth Community.” The cultural historian Thomas Berry refers to this vital endeavor as the Great Work of our time.2 It is every person's responsibility and privilege to contribute to this metamorphosis. Transformational

. . .biographers tend to regard as character those elements of personality that remain constant, or nearly so, throughout. . .Like practitioners of fractal geometry, biographers seek patterns that persist as one moves from micro- to macro-levels of analysis, and back again. . . . It follows from this that the scale across which we seek similarity need not be chronological. Consider the following incidents in the life of Stalin between 1929 and 1940, arranged not by dates but in terms of ascending horror. Start with the parrot he kept in a cage in his Kremlin apartment. The dictator had the habit of pacing up and down for long periods of time, smoking his pipe, brooding, and occasionally spitting on the floor. One day the parrot tried to mimic Stalin's spitting. He immediately reached into the cage with his pipe and crushed the parrot's head. A very micro-level event, you might well say, so what? But then you learn that Stalin, while on vacation in the Crimea, was once kept awake by a barking dog. It turned out to be a seeing-eye dog that belonged to a blind peasant. The dog wound up being shot, and the peasant wound up in the Gulag. And then you learn that Stalin drove his independently minded second wife, who tried to talk back to him, into committing suicide. And that he arranged for Trotsky, who also talked back, to be assassinated halfway around the world. And that he arranged as well the deaths of as many of Trotsky's associates that he could reach, as well as the deaths of hundred of thousands of other people who never had anything to do with Trotsky. And that when his own people began to talk back by resisting the collectivization of agriculture, he allowed some fourteen million of them to die from the resulting starvation, exile, or imprisonment. Again, there's self-similarity across scale, except that the scale this time is a body count. It's a fractal geometry of terror. Stalin's character extended across time and space, to be sure, but what's most striking about it is its extension across scale: the fact that his behavior seemed much the same in large matters, small matters, and most of those that lay in between.

Instead of the former divinely appointed aims of the Jewish, Greek, or Roman nations, which ancient historians regarded as representing the progress of humanity, modern history has postulated its own aims- the welfare of the French, German, or English people, or, in its highest abstraction, the welfare and civilization of humanity in general, by which is usually meant that of the peoples occupying a small northwesterly portion of a large continent.

The military historian John Keegan notes that by the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE, the chariot allowed nomadic armies to rain death on the civilizations they invaded. “Circling at a distance of 100 or 200 yards from the herds of unarmored foot soldiers, a chariot crew—one to drive, one to shoot—might have transfixed six men a minute. Ten minutes’ work by ten chariots would cause 500 casualties or more, a Battle of the Somme–like toll among the small armies of the period.”14

Quite unlike conscious memories from the time of maturity, they are not fixed at the moment of being experienced and afterwards repeated, but are only elicited at a later age when childhood is already past; in the process they are altered and falsified, and are put into the service of later trends, so that generally speaking they cannot be sharply distinguished from phantasies. Their nature is perhaps best illustrated by a comparison with the way in which the writing of history originated among the peoples of antiquity. As long as a nation was small and weak it gave no thought to the writing of its history. Men tilled the soil of their land, fought for their existence against their neighbours, and tried to gain territory from them and to acquire wealth. It was an age of heroes not of historians. Then came another age, an age of reflection: men felt themselves to be rich and powerful, and now felt a need to learn where they had come from and how they had developed.

A century ago, historians of technology felt that individual inventors were the main actors that brought about the Industrial Revolution. Such heroic interpretations were discarded in favor of views that emphasized deeper economic and social factors such as institutions, incentives, demand, and factor prices. It seems, however, that the crucial elements were neither brilliant individuals nor the impersonal forces governing the masses, but a small group of at most a few thousand people who formed a creative community based on the exchange of knowledge. Engineers, mechanics, chemists, physicians, and natural philosophers formed circles in which access to knowledge was the primary objective. Paired with the appreciation that such knowledge could be the base of ever-expanding prosperity, these elite networks were indispensable, even if individual members were not. Theories that link education and human capital to technological progress need to stress the importance of these small creative communities jointly with wider phenomena such as literacy rates and universal schooling.

When, at the dying man’s bedside, his nearest and dearest bend over his stammerings, it is not so much to decipher in them some last wish, but rather to gather up a good phrase which they can quote later on, in order to honor his memory. If the Roman historians never fail to describe the agony of their emperors, it is in order to place within them a sentence or an exclamation which the latter uttered or were supposed to have uttered. This is true for all deathbeds, even the most ordinary. That life signifies nothing, everyone knows or suspects; let it at least be saved by a turn of phrase! A sentence at the corners of their life—that is about all we ask of the great—and of the small. If they fail this requirement, this obligation, they are lost forever; for we forgive everything, down to crimes, on condition they are exquisitely glossed—and glossed over. This is the absolution man grants history as a whole, when no other criterion is seen to be operative and valid, and when he himself, recapitulating the general inanity, finds no other dignity than that of a litterateur of failure and an aesthete of bloodshed.

As the reach of the 1619 Project grew, so did the backlash. A small group of historians publicly attempted to discredit the project by challenging its historical interpretations and pointing to what they said were historical errors. They did not agree with our framing, which treated slavery and anti-Blackness as foundational to America. They did not like our assertion that Black Americans have served as this nation’s most ardent freedom fighters and have waged their battles mostly alone, or the idea that so much of modern American life has been shaped not by the majestic ideals of our founding but by its grave hypocrisy.

fascist politicians themselves are invariably vastly more corrupt than those they seek to supplant or defeat. As the historian Richard Grunberger writes in his book The 12-Year Reich, It was a paradoxical situation. Having dinned it into the collective consciousness that democracy and corruption were synonymous, the Nazis set about constructing a governmental system beside which the scandals of the Weimar regime seemed small blemishes on the body politic. Corruption was in fact the central organizing principle of the Third Reich—and yet a great many citizens not only overlooked this fact, but actually regarded the men of the new regime as austerely dedicated to moral probity.2

To study the laws of history we must completely change the subject of our observation, must leave aside kings, ministers, and generals, and study the common, infinitesimally small elements by which the masses are moved. No one can say in how far it is possible for man to advance in this way toward an understanding of the laws of history; but it is evident that only along that path does the possibility of discovering the laws of history lie, and that as yet not a millionth part as much mental effort has been applied in this direction by historians as has been devoted to describing the actions of various kings, commanders, and ministers and propounding the historians’ own reflections concerning these actions.

[Tolstoy] denounced [many historians'] lamentable tendency to simplify. The experts stumble onto a battlefield, into a parliament or public square, and demand, "Where is he? Where is he?" "Where is who?" "The hero, of course! The leader, the creator, the great man!" And having found him, they promptly ignore all his peers and troops and advisors. They close their eyes and abstract their Napoleon from the mud and the smoke and the masses on either side, and marvel at how such a figure could possibly have prevailed in so many battles and commanded the destiny of an entire continent. "There was an eye to see in this man," wrote Thomas Carlyle about Napoleon in 1840, "a soul to dare and do. He rose naturally to be the King. All men saw that he was such." But Tolstoy saw differently. "Kings are the slaves of history," he declared. "The unconscious swarmlike life of mankind uses every moment of a king's life as an instrument for its purposes." Kings and commanders and presidents did not interest Tolstoy. History, his history, looks elsewhere: it is the study of infinitely incremental, imperceptible change from one state of being (peace) to another (war). The experts claimed that the decisions of exceptional men could explain all of history's great events. For the novelist, this belief was evidence of their failure to grasp the reality of an incremental change brought about by the multitude's infinitely small actions.

Historian Peter Vronsky hypothesizes that while several factors must align to make a murderer (genetics and frontal lobe injuries being two common ones), World War II was responsible for this golden age of serial killers a generation later. Specifically, according to Vronsky, while all American soldiers who fought in WWII were trained to kill, a small contingent used the cover of state-sanctioned violence to also rape, torture, and collect human body parts as trophies. Though most returning GIs successfully reintegrated into society, some brought the brutality of war into their homes, abusing their families behind closed doors. That abuse, occurring as it did in a culture openly promoting war, created the fertile ground from which the first major crop of American serial killers would spring.

Despair springs eternal. At least since the Hebrew prophets and the Book of Revelation, seers have warned their contemporaries about an imminent doomsday. Forecasts of End Times are a staple of psychics, mystics, televangelists, nut cults, founders of religions, and men pacing the sidewalk with sandwich boards saying “Repent!”9 The storyline that climaxes in harsh payback for technological hubris is an archetype of Western fiction, including Promethean fire, Pandora’s box, Icarus’s flight, Faust’s bargain, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Frankenstein’s monster, and, from Hollywood, more than 250 end-of-the-world flicks.10 As the historian of science Eric Zencey has observed, “There is seduction in apocalyptic thinking. If one lives in the Last Days, one’s actions, one’s very life, take on historical meaning and no small measure of poignance.

According to historian Darren Dochuk, Tea Party observers have radically underestimated the white evangelicals support that buttressed the movement. By 2011, white evangelicals had come to be ‘driven by a theology of small government, free enterprise, family values, and Christian patriotism, and backed by a phalanx of politically charged churches, corporations, and action committees.’ As Dochuk writes this "late Tea Partyism has come into focus as principally a revitalized evangelical conservatism." Among white evangelicals, the Tea Party did not constitute extremist positions, but rather elevated the values they saw neglected yet sorely needed today. Similarly, David Campbell and Robert Putnam also find religion to be central to the Tea Party; alongside their Republicanism, they "want to see religion play a prominent role role in politics.

Police have announced the untimely and gruesome death of local poet and Leeds historian Michael Dooley. Mr. Dooley’s piteous remains were found in the pond of Langford Primary School, in the lunch bags of four children who attend the self-same school, in the confessional at Leeds Catholic Church, in the lanterns that line the catwalk that stretches between McCauliffe Park and Tremens Terrace, in a collection of small metal lock-boxes owned by local box collector Ruth Swaddleston, and wound around the trunks of ancient trees in the loneliest reaches of Look Park. Two toes each were found in stewpots in the kitchens of Mary Lowerton, Richard Frogtoucher, Susan Diggle, Nathaniel Ronstadt, and Robert Grain-Toggle. The poor man’s face was found hanging from a coat-hanger of local doctor Elias Stonehearse. It expected that more of Mr. Dooley will turn up when, once again, spring thaws the rivers and roads of our lovely city.

In the empires of the Middle East, China, India, and Europe, which are economically dependent on agriculture, a small elite, comprising not more than 2 percent of the population, which the help of a small band of retainers, systematically robbed the masses of the produce they had grown in order to support their aristocratic lifestyle. Yet, social historians argue, without this iniquitous arrangement, human beings would probably never have the leisure to develop the civilized arts and sciences that made progress possible. All premodern civilizations adopted this oppressive implications for religion, which permeated all human activities, including state building and government. Indeed, we shall see that premodern politics was inseparable from religion. And if a ruling elite adopted an ethical tradition, such as Buddishm, Christianity, or Islam, the aristocratic clergy usually adapted their ideology so that it could support the structural violence of the state.

In the northern colonies, European Americans tended to own one or two slaves who worked on the family farm or were hired out. Rhode Island and Connecticut had a few large farms, where twenty or thirty slaves would live and work. Plantation-based slavery was more common in the South, where hundreds of slaves could be owned by the same person and forced to work in tobacco, indigo, or rice fields. In most cities, slaveholdings were small, usually one or two slaves who slept in the attic or cellar of the slave owner’s home. Abigail Smith Adams, a Congregational minister’s daughter, grew up outside Boston in a household that owned two slaves, Tom and Pheby. As an adult, she denounced slavery, as did her husband, John Adams, the second President of the United States. Historians recently discovered the remains of slaves found in the African Burial Ground near today’s City Hall in New York City. By studying the skeletons, scientists discovered that the slaves of New York suffered from poor nutrition, disease, and years of backbreaking labor. Most of them died young.

The essence of Roosevelt’s leadership, I soon became convinced, lay in his enterprising use of the “bully pulpit,” a phrase he himself coined to describe the national platform the presidency provides to shape public sentiment and mobilize action. Early in Roosevelt’s tenure, Lyman Abbott, editor of The Outlook, joined a small group of friends in the president’s library to offer advice and criticism on a draft of his upcoming message to Congress. “He had just finished a paragraph of a distinctly ethical character,” Abbott recalled, “when he suddenly stopped, swung round in his swivel chair, and said, ‘I suppose my critics will call that preaching, but I have got such a bully pulpit.’ ” From this bully pulpit, Roosevelt would focus the charge of a national movement to apply an ethical framework, through government action, to the untrammeled growth of modern America. Roosevelt understood from the outset that this task hinged upon the need to develop powerfully reciprocal relationships with members of the national press. He called them by their first names, invited them to meals, took questions during his midday shave, welcomed their company at day’s end while he signed correspondence, and designated, for the first time, a special room for them in the West Wing. He brought them aboard his private railroad car during his regular swings around the country. At every village station, he reached the hearts of the gathered crowds with homespun language, aphorisms, and direct moral appeals. Accompanying reporters then extended the reach of Roosevelt’s words in national publications. Such extraordinary rapport with the press did not stem from calculation alone. Long before and after he was president, Roosevelt was an author and historian. From an early age, he read as he breathed. He knew and revered writers, and his relationship with journalists was authentically collegial. In a sense, he was one of them. While exploring Roosevelt’s relationship with the press, I was especially drawn to the remarkably rich connections he developed with a team of journalists—including Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and William Allen White—all working at McClure’s magazine, the most influential contemporary progressive publication. The restless enthusiasm and manic energy of their publisher and editor, S. S. McClure, infused the magazine with “a spark of genius,” even as he suffered from periodic nervous breakdowns. “The story is the thing,” Sam McClure responded when asked to account for the methodology behind his publication. He wanted his writers to begin their research without preconceived notions, to carry their readers through their own process of discovery. As they educated themselves about the social and economic inequities rampant in the wake of teeming industrialization, so they educated the entire country. Together, these investigative journalists, who would later appropriate Roosevelt’s derogatory term “muckraker” as “a badge of honor,” produced a series of exposés that uncovered the invisible web of corruption linking politics to business. McClure’s formula—giving his writers the time and resources they needed to produce extended, intensively researched articles—was soon adopted by rival magazines, creating what many considered a golden age of journalism. Collectively, this generation of gifted writers ushered in a new mode of investigative reporting that provided the necessary conditions to make a genuine bully pulpit of the American presidency. “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the progressive mind was characteristically a journalistic mind,” the historian Richard Hofstadter observed, “and that its characteristic contribution was that of the socially responsible reporter-reformer.

Many historians, many sociologists and psychologists have written at length, and with deep concern, about the price that Western man has had to pay and will go on paying for technological progress. They point out, for example, that democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such concentration and centralization of power. As the machinery of mass production is made more efficient it tends to become more complex and more expensive – and so less available to the enterpriser of limited means. Moreover, mass production cannot work without mass distribution; but mass distribution raises problems which only the largest producers can satisfactorily solve. In a world of mass production and mass distribution the Little Man, with his inadequate stock of working capital, is at a grave disadvantage. In competition with the Big Man, he loses his money and finally his very existence as an independent producer; the Big Man has gobbled him up. As the Little Men disappear, more and more economic power comes to be wielded by fewer and fewer people. Under a dictatorship the Big Business, made possible by advancing technology and the consequent ruin of Little Business, is controlled by the State – that is to say, by a small group of party leaders and the soldiers, policemen and civil servants who carry out their orders.

Cribbage!” I declared, pulling out the board, a deck of cards, and pen and paper, “Ben and I are going to teach you. Then we can all play.” “What makes you think I don’t know how to play cribbage?” Sage asked. “You do?” Ben sounded surprised. “I happen to be an excellent cribbage player,” Sage said. “Really…because I’m what one might call a cribbage master,” Ben said. “I bet I’ve been playing longer than you,” Sage said, and I cast my eyes his way. Was he trying to tell u something? “I highly doubt that,” Ben said, “but I believe we’ll see the proof when I double-skunk you.” “Clearly you’re both forgetting it’s a three-person game, and I’m ready to destroy you both,” I said. “Deal ‘em,” Ben said. Being a horse person, my mother was absolutely convinced she could achieve world peace if she just got the right parties together on a long enough ride. I didn’t know about that, but apparently cribbage might do the trick. I didn’t know about that, but apparently cribbage might do the trick. The three of us were pretty evenly matched, and Ben was impressed enough to ask sage how he learned to play. Turned out Sage’s parents were historians, he said, so they first taught him the precursor to cribbage, a game called noddy. “Really?” Ben asked, his professional curiosity piqued. “Your parents were historians? Did they teach?” “European history. In Europe,” Sage said. “Small college. They taught me a lot.” Yep, there was the metaphorical gauntlet. I saw the gleam in Ben’s eye as he picked it up. “Interesting,” he said. “So you’d say you know a lot about European history?” “I would say that. In fact, I believe I just did.” Ben grinned, and immediately set out to expose Sage as an intellectual fraud. He’d ask questions to trip Sage up and test his story, things I had no idea were tests until I heard Sage’s reactions. “So which of Shakespeare’s plays do you think was better served by the Globe Theatre: Henry VIII or Troilus and Cressida?” Ben asked, cracking his knuckles. “Troilus and Cressida was never performed at the Globe,” Sage replied. “As for Henry VIII, the original Globe caught fire during the show and burned to the ground, so I’d say that’s the show that really brought down the house…wouldn’t you?” “Nice…very nice.” Ben nodded. “Well done.” It was the cerebral version of bamboo under the fingernails, and while they both tried to seem casual about their conversation, they were soon leaning forward with sweat beading on their brows. It was fascinating…and weird. After several hours of this, Ben had to admit that he’d found a historical peer, and he gleefully involved Sage in all kinds of debates about the minutiae of eras I knew nothing about…except that I had the nagging sense I might have been there for some of them. For his part, Sage seemed to relish talking about the past with someone who could truly appreciate the detailed anecdotes and stories he’d discovered in his “research.” By the time we started our descent to Miami, the two were leaning over my seat to chat and laugh together. On the very full flight from Miami to New York, Ben and Sage took the two seats next to each other and gabbed and giggled like middle-school girls. I sat across from them stuck next to an older woman wearing far too much perfume.

In Paris explanations come in a predictable sequence, no matter what is being explained. First comes the explanation in terms of the unique, romantic individual, then the explanation in terms of ideological absolutes, and then the explanation in terms of the futility of all explanation. So, for instance, if your clothes dryer breaks down and you want to get the people from BHV—the strange Sears, Roebuck of Paris— to come fix it, you will be told, first, that only one man knows how it works and he cannot be found (explanation in terms of the gifts of the romanticized individual); next, that it cannot be fixed for a week because of a store policy (explanation in terms of ideological necessity); and, finally, that you are perfectly right to find all this exasperating, but nothing can be done, because it is in the nature of things for a dryer to break down, dryers are like that (futility of explanation itself). "They are sensitive machines; they are ill suited to the task; no one has ever made one successfully," the store bureaucrat in charge of service says, sighing. "C'est normal." And what works small works big too. The same sequence that explains the broken dryer also governs the explanations of the French Revolution that have been offered by the major French historians. "Voltaire did all this!" was de La Villette's explanation (only one workman); an inevitable fight between the bourgeoisie and the aristocrats, the Marxists said (store policy); until, finally, Foucault announced that there is nothing really worth explaining in the coming of the Reign of Terror, since everything in Western culture, seen properly, is a reign of terror (all dryers are like that).

As the reach of the 1619 Project grew, so did the backlash. A small group of historians publicly attempted to discredit the project by challenging its historical interpretations and pointing to what they said were historical errors. They did not agree with our framing, which treated slavery and anti-Blackness as foundational to America. They did not like our assertion that Black Americans have served as this nation’s most ardent freedom fighters and have waged their battles mostly alone, or the idea that so much of modern American life has been shaped not by the majestic ideals of our founding but by its grave hypocrisy. And they especially did not like a paragraph I wrote about the motivations of the colonists who declared independence from Britain. “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology,” that paragraph began, “is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” Later, in response to other scholars who believed we hadn’t been specific enough and to clarify that this sentence had never been meant to imply that every single colonist shared this motivation, we changed the sentence to read “some of the colonists.” But that mattered little to some of our critics. The linking of slavery and the American Revolution directly challenged the cornerstone of national identity embedded in our public history, the narratives taught to us in elementary schools, museums and memorials, Hollywood movies, and in many scholarly works as well.16 The assertions about the role slavery played in the American Revolution shocked many of our readers. But these assertions came directly from academic historians who had been making this argument for decades. Plainly, the historical ideas and arguments in the 1619 Project were not new.17 We based them on the wealth of scholarship that has redefined the field of American history since at least the 1960s, including Benjamin Quarles’s landmark book The Negro in the American Revolution, first published in 1961; Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877; Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family; and Alan Taylor’s The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832. What seemed to provoke so much ire was that we had breached the wall between academic history and popular understanding, and we had done so in The New York Times, the paper of record, in a major multimedia project led by a Black

All the substances that are the main drugs of abuse today originate in natural plant products and have been known to human beings for thousands of years. Opium, the basis of heroin, is an extract of the Asian poppy Papaver somniferum. Four thousand years ago, the Sumerians and Egyptians were already familiar with its usefulness in treating pain and diarrhea and also with its powers to affect a person’s psychological state. Cocaine is an extract of the leaves of Erythroxyolon coca, a small tree that thrives on the eastern slopes of the Andes in western South America. Amazon Indians chewed coca long before the Conquest, as an antidote to fatigue and to reduce the need to eat on long, arduous mountain journeys. Coca was also venerated in spiritual practices: Native people called it the Divine Plant of the Incas. In what was probably the first ideological “War on Drugs” in the New World, the Spanish invaders denounced coca’s effects as a “delusion from the devil.” The hemp plant, from which marijuana is derived, first grew on the Indian subcontinent and was christened Cannabis sativa by the Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus in 1753. It was also known to ancient Persians, Arabs and Chinese, and its earliest recorded pharmaceutical use appears in a Chinese compendium of medicine written nearly three thousand years ago. Stimulants derived from plants were also used by the ancient Chinese, for example in the treatment of nasal and bronchial congestion. Alcohol, produced by fermentation that depends on microscopic fungi, is such an indelible part of human history and joy making that in many traditions it is honoured as a gift from the gods. Contrary to its present reputation, it has also been viewed as a giver of wisdom. The Greek historian Herodotus tells of a tribe in the Near East whose council of elders would never sustain a decision they made when sober unless they also confirmed it under the influence of strong wine. Or, if they came up with something while intoxicated, they would also have to agree with themselves after sobering up. None of these substances could affect us unless they worked on natural processes in the human brain and made use of the brain’s innate chemical apparatus. Drugs influence and alter how we act and feel because they resemble the brain’s own natural chemicals. This likeness allows them to occupy receptor sites on our cells and interact with the brain’s intrinsic messenger systems. But why is the human brain so receptive to drugs of abuse? Nature couldn’t have taken millions of years to develop the incredibly intricate system of brain circuits, neurotransmitters and receptors that become involved in addiction just so people could get “high” to escape their troubles or have a wild time on a Saturday night. These circuits and systems, writes a leading neuroscientist and addiction researcher, Professor Jaak Panksepp, must “serve some critical purpose other than promoting the vigorous intake of highly purified chemical compounds recently developed by humans.” Addiction may not be a natural state, but the brain regions it subverts are part of our central machinery of survival.

It will be seen how there can be the idea of a special science, the *critique of pure reason* as it may be called. For reason is the faculty which supplies the *principles* of *a priori* knowledge. Pure reason therefore is that which contains the principles of knowing something entirely *a priori*. An *organon* of pure reason would be the sum total of the principles by which all pure *a priori* knowledge can be acquired and actually established. Exhaustive application of such an organon would give us a system of pure reason. But as this would be a difficult task, and as at present it is still doubtful whether indeed an expansion of our knowledge is possible here at all, we may regard a science that merely judges pure reason, its sources and limits, as the *propaedeutic* to the system of pure reason. In general, it would have to be called only a *critique*, not a *doctrine* of pure reason. Its utility, in regard to speculation, would only be negative, for it would serve only to purge rather than to expand our reason, and, which after all is a considerable gain, would guard reason against errors. I call all knowledge *transcendental* which deals not so much with objects as with our manner of knowing objects insofar as this manner is to be possible *a priori*. A system of such concepts would be called *transcendental philosophy*. But this is still, as a beginning, too great an undertaking. For since such a science must contain completely both analytic and synthetic *a priori* knowledge, it is, as far as our present purpose is concerned, much too comprehensive. We will be satisfied to carry the analysis only so far as is indispensably necessary in order to understand in their whole range the principles of *a priori* synthesis, with which alone we are concerned. This investigation, which properly speaking should be called only a transcendental critique but not a doctrine, is all we are dealing with at present. It is not meant to expand our knowledge but only to correct it, and to become the touchstone of the value, or lack of value, of all *a priori* knowledge. Such a critique is therefore the preparation, as far as possible, for a new organon, or, if this should turn out not to be possible, for a canon at least, according to which, thereafter, the complete system of a philosophy of pure reason, whether it serve as an expansion or merely as a limitation of its knowledge, may be carried out both analytically and synthetically. That such a system is possible, indeed that it need not be so comprehensive as to cut us off from the hope of completing it, may already be gathered from the fact that it would have to deal not with the nature of things, which is inexhaustible, but with the understanding which makes judgments about the nature of things, and with this understanding again only as far as its *a priori* knowledge is concerned. The supply of this *a priori* knowledge cannot be hidden from us, as we need not look for it outside the understanding, and we may suppose this supply to prove sufficiently small for us to record completely, judge as to its value or lack of value and appraise correctly. Still less ought we to expect here a critique of books and systems of pure reason, but only the critique of the faculty of pure reason itself. Only once we are in possession of this critique do we have a reliable touchstone for estimating the philosophical value of old and new works on this subject. Otherwise, an unqualified historian and judge does nothing but pass judgments upon the groundless assertions of others by means of his own, which are equally groundless.

As historians have pointed out, there was some irony to this agreement. Hitler wanted to attack and subdue Russia as well as Europe. He knew that Germany could not wage war on a global scale with its small reserves of raw materials such as oil, rubber, and grain. Hitler arranged for the Russians to furnish him with everything he would need to invade Russia. Stalin essentially agreed to supply the attack on his own country.

Roughly speaking: more than forty held government bonds. More than twenty were moneylenders. Over fifteen were slave owners. The rest an assortment of land and debt speculators. And most dabbled in more than one category. George Washington, for example, was a slave owner, a moneylender, a land speculator, and the largest holder of government IOUs in the country. Who was not at the Convention is as interesting as who was: unrepresented were small farmers, shopkeepers, Revolutionary War veterans, laborers, indentured servants, and, of course, slaves, Indians, and women. What we have instead is a small circle of capitalist elites with George Washington at the center. They were (if we’re to believe only half of what Beard tells us) a rogues’ gallery of scoundrels, scalawags, moneylenders, stockjobbers,XXIX embezzlers, and, as it would turn out, traitors. Not to mention lawyers. Men, it would be fair to say, drawn to the power of their own purses.

He and others have interpreted contemporary accounts in terms of a succession of impacts, too small to have a global impact but quite sufficient to cause mayhem in the ancient world, largely through generating destructive atmospheric shock waves, earthquakes, tsunamis, and wildfires. Many urban centres in Europe, Africa, and Asia appear to have collapsed almost simultaneously around 2350 BC, and records abound of flood, fire, quake, and general chaos. These sometimes fanciful accounts are, of course, open to alternative interpretation, and hard evidence for bombardment from space around this time remains elusive. Having said this, seven impact craters in Australia, Estonia, and Argentina have been allocated ages of 4,000–5,000 years and the search goes on for others. Even more difficult to defend are propositions by some that the collapse of the Roman Empire and the onset of the Dark Ages may somehow have been triggered by increased numbers of impacts when the Earth last passed through the dense part of the Taurid Complex between 400 and 600 AD. Hard evidence for these is weak and periods of deteriorated climate attributed to impacts around this time can equally well be explained by large volcanic explosions. In recent years there has, in fact, been a worrying tendency amongst archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians to attempt to explain every historical event in terms of a natural catastrophe of some sort –whether asteroid impact, volcanic eruption, or earthquake –many on the basis of the flimsiest of evidence. As the aim of this volume is to shed light on how natural catastrophes can affect us all, I would be foolish to argue that past civilizations have not suffered many times at the hands of nature. Attributing everything from the English Civil War and the French Revolution to the fall of Rome and the westward march of Genghis Khan to natural disasters only serves, however, to devalue the potentially cataclysmic effects of natural hazards and to trivialize the role of nature in shaping the course

It is no wonder that historians trace the birth of Western civilization to these jewels of the Aegean, Ionian, and Mediterranean seas. The Greek Isles are home to wide-ranging and far-reaching cultural traditions and mythic tales, not to mention the colorful history and unforgettable vistas that still draw thousands of tourists to the region every year. Minoan ruins stand alongside Byzantine churches and Crusader fortresses. Terra-cotta pots spilling over with hibiscus flowers adorn blinding-white stucco houses that reflect the sun’s dazzling light. Fishing villages perched upon craggy cliffs overlook clusters of colorful boats in island harbors. Centuries-old citrus and olive groves dot the hillsides. Lush vegetation and rocky shores meet isolated stretches of sand and an azure sea. Masts bob left and right on sailboats moored in secluded inlets. Each island is a world unto itself. Although outsiders and neighbors have inhabited, visited, and invaded these islands throughout the centuries, the islands’ rugged geography and small size have also ensured a certain isolation. In this environment, traditional ways of life thrive. The arts--pottery, glass blowing, gem carving, sculpture, and painting, among others--flourish here today, as contemporary craft artists keep alive techniques begun in antiquity. In the remote hilltop villages of Kárpathos, for example, artisans practice crafts that date back eons, and inhabitants speak a dialect close to ancient Greek. Today, to walk along the pebbled pathways of a traditional Greek mountain village or the marbled streets of an ancient acropolis is to step back in time. To meander at a leisurely pace through these island chains by boat is to be captivated by the same dramatic landscapes and enchanted islets that make the myths of ancient Greece so compelling. To witness the Mediterranean sun setting on the turquoise sea is to receive one of life’s greatest blessings.

Reagan never forgot the emotional impact of being at the wall. It was incomprehensible that in the decades following the fall of Nazi Germany, such a prison would be erected in the heart of Berlin, with the sole purpose of keeping an entire population of people under guard. The existence of the wall encapsulated his abhorrence of the Communist state. What kind of society, he wondered, can function only by trapping its citizens and forcing them into compliance? There could be no justification in ideology or necessity for such an abomination. Why was the Western world—and the United States!—so complicit in the continuation of this travesty? That wall should come down, he thought. He returned to the United States haunted by what he had experienced. By the third year of Carter’s presidency, it was becoming clear that there was going to be an opening for a strong contender. The professor and historian Andrew E. Busch captured Carter’s core dilemma well, writing that not only was he besieged by economic crises, but in his posture toward the Soviets “he became Teddy Roosevelt in reverse, speaking loudly and carrying a twig. An increasing majority of Americans thought Carter too small for the job.” If Carter had been elected in a post-Watergate cleansing, his moral authority was diminished by his failures of governance.

There have been few people on earth so upright and single minded, so faithful in the discharge of their duties towards God and man, so elevated in aim, so dignified in character. The enlightened, independent, firm, God-fearing spirit of the French Protestants has blended its influence with that of the Puritan to form our national character and to establish those civil and religious institutions by which we are distinguished and blessed above all peoples." So skilled were they in the arts, such a spirit of economy and thrift characterized them, such loyalty had they to the principles of our national life, such sane and tolerant views in religious matters, such uprightness and excel lence and nobility of character, such high and command ing genius in statesmanship, that their presence, even though they formed but a small body as to numbers and were so assimilated as to sink their identity in the com mon body, exerted a moulding and ennobling influence upon the entire fabric of our national life. Deserving of high honour are Puritan and Pilgrim. Let orator and historian continue to sound their praises. But side by side with them, sharers in their sufferings, partakers of their perils, distinguished helpers in their great labours, stimulating and inspiring, stood a smaller company whose life and deeds and spirit were also important factors in giving this land those institutions of civil and religious liberty by means of which she is steadily ful filling her high mission and successfully working out her great destiny. BOOK ONE

There have been few people on earth so upright and single minded, so faithful in the discharge of their duties towards God and man, so elevated in aim, so dignified in character. The enlightened, independent, firm, God-fearing spirit of the French Protestants has blended its influence with that of the Puritan to form our national character and to establish those civil and religious institutions by which we are distinguished and blessed above all peoples." So skilled were they in the arts, such a spirit of economy and thrift characterized them, such loyalty had they to the principles of our national life, such sane and tolerant views in religious matters, such uprightness and excel lence and nobility of character, such high and command ing genius in statesmanship, that their presence, even though they formed but a small body as to numbers and were so assimilated as to sink their identity in the com mon body, exerted a moulding and ennobling influence upon the entire fabric of our national life. Deserving of high honour are Puritan and Pilgrim. Let orator and historian continue to sound their praises. But side by side with them, sharers in their sufferings, partakers of their perils, distinguished helpers in their great labours, stimulating and inspiring, stood a smaller company whose life and deeds and spirit were also important factors in giving this land those institutions of civil and religious liberty by means of which she is steadily ful filling her high mission and successfully working out her great destiny.

These horror stories about Hamilton have been regurgitated for two centuries and are now engraved on the memories of historians and readers alike. Unfortunately, these vignettes often cruelly misrepresent Hamilton and have done no small damage to his reputation. Jefferson understood very well the power of laying down a paper trail.

Our regiment was all women…We flew to the front in May 1942… The planes they gave us were Po-2s. Small, slow. They flew only at a low level. Hedge-hopping. Just over the ground! Before the war young people in flying clubs learned to fly in them, but no one could have imagined they would have any military use. The plane was constructed entirely of plywood, covered with aircraft fabric. In fact, with cheesecloth. One direct hit and it caught fire and burned up completely in the air, before reaching the ground. Like a match. The only solid metal part was the M-11 motor. Later on, toward the end of the war, we were issued parachutes, and a machine gun was installed in the pilot’s cabin, but before there had been no weapon, except for four bomb racks under the wings—that’s all. Nowadays they’d call us kamikazes, and maybe we were kamikazes. Yes! We were! But victory was valued more than our lives. “Before I retired, I became ill from the very thought of how I could possibly not work. Why then had I completed a second degree in my fifties? I became a historian. I had been a geologist all my life. But a good geologist is always in the field, and I no longer had the strength for it. A doctor came, took a cardiogram, and asked, “When did you have a heart attack?” “What heart attack?” “Your heart is scarred all over.” I must have acquired those scars during the war. You approach a target, and you’re shaking all over. Your whole body is shaking, because below it’s all gunfire: fighter planes are shooting, antiaircraft guns are shooting…Several girls had to leave the regiment; they couldn’t stand it. We flew mostly during the night. For a while they tried sending us on day missions, but gave it up at once. A rifle shot could bring down a Po-2… We did up to twelve flights a night. (...) You come back and you can’t even get out of the cabin; they used to pull us out. We couldn’t carry the chart case; we dragged it on the ground. And the work our girl armorers did! They had to attach four bombs to the aircraft by hand—that meant eight hundred pounds. They did it all night: one plane takes off, another lands. The body reorganized itself so much during the war that we weren’t women…We didn’t have those women’s things…Periods…You know…And after the war not all of us could have children.

The war between Jews and Romans was fought with great ferocity by both sides, and it led to suffering, death, and destruction on a scale for which we have no other comparable testimony in the history of the early Roman empire, even if Josephus, its historian, exaggerated casualty figures on both sides. Yet some scholars have downplayed the scale and significance of the war of Jews against Romans. This book will prove that the war was not small, short,

What did not happen in Florida, in either the Second or Third Seminole War, was the provision of enough forces and transportation to affect the object of these wars, the final removal of all Native Americans from the peninsula. Prior to the war’s end, rewards were offered by the United States government for the capture of Seminoles. This policy failed to bring in any significant number of Native Americans; however, by early 1858, the war was winding down. White flags and other signs were hung out on known paths used by the Seminoles, and military operations were ordered stopped by Colonel Loomis. Elias Rector, the superintendent for Indian Affairs in the southern superintendency, came to Florida in January 1858 to assist in the negotiations for peace. After a conference was held 35 miles from Fort Myers with Assinwah’s band and others, the terms were offered and monetary inducements guaranteed. On May 4, 1858, Billy Bowlegs and most of his band boarded the Grey Cloud and sailed to Egmont Key, at the mouth of Tampa Bay. Here this group was joined by 41 prisoners and made ready for the trip west. By May 8, the war was declared officially over. The army believed that there were only about 100 Seminoles and Miccosukees left in Florida. This number included the aged leader Sam Jones. There is a debate on just when this ancient and respected leader died; however, it is known that he was gone before the end of Civil War. Where his remains were deposited is a secret to this day. It is from this small number of Seminoles and Miccosukees that today’s recognized tribes have descended as a continuing tribute to the tenacity of their ancestors’ will to survive. As historian Patsy West has aptly called them, they are “The Enduring Seminoles.” BIBLIOGRAPHY DOCUMENTS A number of collections of documents exist from which the above was drawn, including the Letters Received by the Secretary of War, Registered Series, 1801–1860; Letters Sent by the Secretary of War Relating to Military Affairs, 1800–1889; Letters Received by the Office of the Adjutant General (Main Series) 1822–1860; and Letters Sent, Registers of Letters Received, and Letters Received by Headquarters, Troops in Florida, and Headquarters Department of Florida, 1850–1858. The collections are all on microfilm from the National Archives. Numerous Congressional documents were also consulted

Naval Warfare: For surface vessels and even submarines there was much continuity between the First and Second World Wars. The battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and submarines of the 1939-45 period were generally bigger, faster, and better armed than their 1914-18 predecessors but not fundamentally different. Indeed, they had not changed much since the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. Yet naval warfare was nevertheless transformed by the introduction of aviation. Fleets that were once built around battleships came to be built around aircraft carriers instead. Aircraft proved superior not just to conventional surface ships but also, in the Battle of the Atlantic, to submarines as well. German U-boats preying on Allied shipping were foiled through a variety of means including convoying of merchants ships and the use of radar and sonar. But the weapon that proved most effective was an aircraft dropping depth charges. The dispatch of long-range B-24s equipped with the latest radar to patrol the North Atlantic in 1943 helped to turn the tide against the U-boats. The proliferation of small escort carriers also allowed air cover for convoys even in the middle of the ocean. Submarines proved more effective in teh Pacific, where the vast distances precluded effective patrolling by aircraft and where the Japanese did not devleop the types of advanced antisubmarine techniques employed by the Allies in the Atlantic. U.S. submarines took a heavy toll on Japanese merchantmen and warships alike once they managed to fix the problems that bedeviled their Mark 14 torpedo early in the war. "A force comprising less than 2 percent of U.S. Navy personnel," naval historian Ronald Spector would write of U.S. submariners, "had accounted for 55 percent of Japan's losses at sea." The torpedo, whether launched by submarines, surface ships, or airplanes, proved the biggest ship-killer of the war.

The vision of the US-Mexico border as a line that divides rather than unites is a dark one. It is fueled by a small measure of truth—because, of course, like most other regions, crime and criminals have found a haven in the borderlands—but a much larger degree of paranoia, racism, misunderstanding, and nationalist mythmaking.

Jewish Ideas Daily In Defense of the Nation-State By Diana Muir Appelbaum Friday, October 5, 2012 In [Daniel Gordis’] new book, The Promise of Israel: Why Its Seemingly Greatest Weakness Is Actually Its Greatest Strength, Gordis weaves the work of political theorists and historians into a compelling case for the nation-state in general and Israel in particular. … the governments that have produced human rights such as personal liberty and the rule of law have most often been ethnically based nation-states … Gordis quotes intellectual historian Mark Lilla, who notes that while Western Europeans have forgotten “all the long-standing problems that the nation-state, as a modern form of political life, managed to solve,” … [Zionism] remembers the wisdom of borders and the need for collective autonomy to establish self-respect and to demand respect from others. … European and American opposition to Israel … reflects the fact that Israel is the archetypal nation-state, and nation-states have fallen from favor in intellectual circles. Until recently, republics have arisen only in small city-states and, usually, only briefly. Apart from these cases, in all of human history only a few ways have been found to organize political life. There is the intense and appalling tribalism of Afghanistan. There are empires in which conquering Herrenvolk oppress conquered peoples. There are dictatorships and monarchies in which individuals may have comforts or privileges but not rights. There has been the universalizing ideology of Marxism, which has produced brutality and death on an unimaginable scale. Then there is the nation-state. The nation-state gives no assurances of the universal peace and justice promised by Marxism, Islam, or the human rights movement. It claims merely that it will attempt to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for its citizens. The nation-state does not claim it will bring peace or justice to the whole world, only that it will work to bring these benefits to a particular people living on a particular piece of land.

In 2014, the historian Catherine Corless made public her shocking discovery that 796 babies died between 1925 and 1961 in the Tuam home, in County Galway.

Not every battle has been recorded, of course. Some skirmishes were too small or too remote to be noted by chroniclers, while some were just one in a sea of other troubles, historians far too busy saving their own skins to write down the details.

Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe in Christ even more boldly, for he is victorious over sin, death, and the world. As long as we are here . . . we have to sin. . . . It is enough that by the riches of God’s glory we have come to know the Lamb that takes away the sin of the world. No sin will separate us from the Lamb, even though we commit fornication and murder a thousand times a day. So you think that the purchase price that was paid for the redemption of our sins by so great a Lamb is too small? Pray boldly—you too are a mighty sinner.

Drive thy Business, let not that drive thee.   Each year one vicious habit rooted out, In time might make the worst Man good throughout.   Wink at small faults; remember thou has great ones. Eat to please thyself, but dress to please others. He that pays for Work before it’s done, has but a pennyworth for twopence. Historians relate, not so much what is done, as what they would have believed. Let thy Child’s first lesson be Obedience, and the second maybe what thou wilt. Blessed is he that expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed. If thou injurest Conscience, it will have its Revenge on

Most of this material is accessible in the Dunayevskaya and Glaberman collections in the Wayne State University Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs in Detroit. When occasionally I look up something in the collections, I find it hard to believe that we wrote so much and took on so many literary critics and historians. The Johnson-Forest Tendency consisted of a small number of members—never more than sixty to seventy in an organization of several hundred. But the fervor with which we supported the independent black struggle and attacked the alienation of human beings in the process of capitalist production made us stand out in any gathering. Most members of the Johnson-Forest Tendency were part of the new generation who had joined the radical movement in the 1940s because we wanted to make a second American Revolution—which to us meant mainly encouraging the struggles of rank-and-file workers to take over control of production inside the plant and supporting the black struggle for full social, economic, and political equality. Black, white, Asian, and Chicano, workers and intellectuals, living on the East Coast, West Coast, and in the Midwest, we were a representative sample of the new human forces that were emerging in the United States during World War II. Because CLR could not be publicly active, we acted as his transmission belt to the larger American community. Our little organization was a collective way to know reality.

Americans, wrote a historian of the period, were in general so ignorant of the realities on the ground that ‘when the Palestinians rose up in resistance they were able to see the Zionists’ increasingly aggressive, colonialist behaviour as a defence of democracy and other progressive Western ideals‘, while this ‘Palestinian resistance to imperialist invasion became a form of unwarranted offense against civilization’.28

de Tocqueville, after his tour of the United States in 1831, was to comment that “The Senate contains within a small space a large proportion of the celebrated men of America. Scarcely an individual is to be seen in it who has not had an active and illustrious career: the Senate is composed of eloquent advocates, distinguished generals, wise magistrates, and statesmen of note, whose arguments would do honor to the most remarkable parliamentary debates of Europe.” De Tocqueville was not the only foreign observer deeply impressed. The Victorian historian Sir Henry Maine said that the Senate was “the only thoroughly successful institution which has been established since the tide of modern democracy began to run.” Prime Minister William Gladstone called it “the most remarkable of all the inventions of modern politics.

The historian David Arkush once compared Russian and Chinese peasant proverbs, and the differences are striking. "If God does not bring it, the earth will not give it" is a typical Russian proverb. That's the kind of fatalism and pessimism typical of a repressive feudal system, where peasants have no reason to believe in the efficacy of their own work. On the other hand, Arkush writes, Chinese proverbs are striking in their belief that "hard work, shrewd planning and self-reliance or cooperation with a small group will in time bring recompense.

where should one focus the study of contemporary phenomena? The nomothetic social scientists were located primarily in the same five countries as the historians, and in the same way studied primarily their own countries (or at most they made comparisons among the five countries). This was to be sure socially rewarded, but in addition the nomothetic social scientists put forward a methodological argument to justify this choice. They said that the best way to avoid bias was to use quantitative data, and that such data were most likely to be located in their own countries in the immediate present. Furthermore, they argued that if we assume the existence of general laws governing social behavior, it would not matter where one studied these phenomena, since what was true in one place and at one time was true in all places at all times. Why not then study phenomena for which one had the most reliable data—that is, the most quantified and replicable data? Social scientists did have one further problem. The four disciplines together (history, economics, sociology, and political science) studied in effect only a small portion of the world. But in the nineteenth century, the five countries were imposing colonial rule on many other parts of the world, and were engaged in commerce and sometimes in warfare with still other parts of the world. It seemed important to study the rest of the world as well. Still, the rest of the world seemed somehow different, and it seemed inappropriate to use four West-oriented disciplines to study parts of the world that were not considered “modern.” As a result, two additional disciplines arose.

Stephen Morillo, one of the leading military historians of Anglo-Norman England, rejected the “great man” approach in his introduction to a series of extracts and articles on the Battle of Hastings. Noting that William had benefited from a contrary wind that delayed his attack until Harold Godwineson had been drawn north by a threat from a third claimant, Harald Hardrada of Norway, Morillo invoked the idea of chaos theory, which describes how small, even random, factors can sometimes have a huge effect on larger systems. Drawing on the quip of another scholar, John Gillingham, he wondered if William, who was sometimes called William the Bastard, due to his illegitimate birth, ought really to be known as William the Lucky Bastard.2

Samuel Willard’s account of her afflictions, widely available in published form after 1684 in Increase Mather’s Remarkable Providences, almost certainly influenced the statements offered eight years later during the witchcraft outbreak. The historian Jane Kamensky has cogently argued that the obsession with books (especially small, easily concealed ones) evident in the Salem records resulted from an explosion in the availability of such volumes after the mid-1680s. After decades in which the sole Bay Colony press published nothing but sermons and official documents, not only were several printers in Massachusetts and the middle colonies now producing almanacs and primers, but increasing numbers of booksellers were also importing books on such topics as astrology and fortune-telling. Because all sorts of occult practices were linked to the devil, clergymen and magistrates could readily envision the dangers potentially lurking in the pages of those volumes. Such concerns induced them to ask the leading questions of many confessors that elicited concurring responses, although Ann Sr.’s vision of the “little Red book” appears to have been her own.

Nicolas Appert, a talented chef with no formal education, wondered whether the method he used to put up sugared fruit in glass jars might be applied to the problem of conserving soup, vegetables, beef stew, and beans. “A dynamic and jovial little man,” according to French historian Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, Appert began his experiments by funneling peas and boiled beef into old champagne bottles, corking them, and sitting them in hot-water baths for varying lengths of time. As curiosity became obsession, Appert sold his Parisian confectionery business and retired to a small town just outside the city, where he spent the better part of a decade perfecting his method. In 1803, Appert delivered the first batch of preserved food to the French navy for field-testing. The contents of his bottles received rave reviews: the beef was pronounced “very edible,” while the beans and green peas had “all the freshness and flavor of freshly picked vegetables.” Appert was awarded the prize and promptly used the money to finance more experiments. Rather than patent his technique, he published a book of detailed instructions so that anyone could master “l’art de conserver.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, he died a pauper. Despite being formally recognized as “a benefactor of humanity” by the French government, even his wife eventually left him, and he ended up buried in a mass grave.

The existing Arab population of Palestine is small and at a low stage of civilisation’, he wrote. ‘It contains within itself none of the elements of progress, but it has its rights, and these must be carefully respected.’ Balfour told Curzon in 1919, in the same vein, that ‘Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.’22 This brutally candid display of partiality, ‘dripping with Olympian disdain’, in the words of a leading Palestinian historian,23 would still arouse Arab anger a turbulent century later.

Mahan, whose son Alfred would grow up to become a prominent naval historian, argued that rather than join the rush to modernity, South Carolina—“this arrogant little state”—had grown ever more insular. “That fine old, careless hospitality, the necessary accompaniment of a sparse and wealthy population, and all its concomitants of high courtesy and geniality, is no longer in keeping with this railroad age,” he wrote. “Men have no longer time to waste in mere talk and dawdling through the livelong day, and even into the small hours of the morning.

A Note on the Text This is a work of fiction based in no part on any individual or individuals. Ireland’s last Magdalen laundry was not closed down until 1996. It is not known how many girls and women were concealed, incarcerated and forced to labour in these institutions. Ten thousand is the modest figure; thirty thousand is probably more accurate. Most of the records from the Magdalen laundries were destroyed, lost, or made inaccessible. Rarely was any of these girls’ or women’s work recognised or acknowledged in any way. Many girls and women lost their babies. Some lost their lives. Some or most lost the lives they could have had. It is not known how many thousands of infants died in these institutions or were adopted out from the mother-and-baby homes. Earlier this year, the Mother and Baby Home Commission Report found that nine thousand children died in just eighteen of the institutions investigated. In 2014, the historian Catherine Corless made public her shocking discovery that 796 babies died between 1925 and 1961 in the Tuam home, in County Galway. These institutions were run and financed by the Catholic Church in concert with the Irish State. No apology was issued by the Irish government over the Magdalen laundries until Taoiseach Enda Kenny did so in 2013. Acknowledgements

Just the vision of a loaf of soft white bread lying on a plate in the center of a small table: bread that retained the fragrance of the oven (surely one of the most delicious in the world) though it was smeared with gray mold. Why would the Americans wish such a thing? Yet all the historians agree that they did, just as they wished their own corpses to appear living forever.

Consistent with the meaning of "bear arms" as carrying weapons on the person, Webster defined "pistol" as "a small fire-arm, or the smallest fire-arm used . . . . Small pistols are carried in the pocket."18 An arms historian notes: "Among eighteenth-century civilians who traveled or lived in large cities, pistols were common weapons. Usually they were made to fit into pockets, and many of these small arms were also carried by military officers.

Even when we have access to the same data, we tend to notice different things. We are all moving along the same sidewalk, but the historian may notice the brickwork, the jogger the impact on her knees, and the fellow in the wheelchair the areas that are less accessible. We’re engulfed by information—far too much to take in—and so we select small samples to pay attention to and ignore the rest.

...we never shall discover all the causal chains that operate: the number of such causes is infinitely great, the causes themselves infinitely small; historians select an absurdly small portion of them and attribute everything to this arbitrarily chosen tiny section.

the kind of minority we’re talking about here is what the historian Arnold Toynbee called a creative minority, which he described as a small but influential group of committed citizens who—motivated by love—bless the host culture, not from the center, but from the margins.27 Here’s Jon Tyson’s definition: A Christian community in a web of stubbornly loyal relationships, knotted together in a living network of persons, in a complex and challenging cultural setting, who are committed to practicing the way of Jesus together for the renewal of the world.

With a historian’s eye, Archibald Gracie attempted to separate truth from fantasy as he listened to the survivors’ stories, a potential book beginning to form in his mind. Second Officer Lightoller and Third Officer Pitman regularly stopped by the small cabin Gracie shared with Hugh Woolner to discuss various aspects of the disaster. All agreed that the explosions heard during the sinking could not have been the ship’s boilers blowing up. From the discovery of the severed wreck in 1985 we now know that the “explosions” were actually the sound of the ship being wrenched apart. But Gracie and Lightoller firmly believed that the ship had sunk intact—a view that would become the prevailing opinion for the next seventy-three years. Gracie thought that Norris Williams and Jack Thayer, “the two young men cited as authority … of the break-in-two theory,” had confused the falling funnel for the ship breaking apart. But both Williams and Thayer knew exactly what they had seen, as did some other eyewitnesses. On the Carpathia, Jack Thayer described the stages of the ship’s sinking and breaking apart to Lewis Skidmore, a Brooklyn art teacher, who drew sketches that were later featured in many newspapers. The inaccuracies in Skidmore’s drawings, however, only bolstered the belief that the ship had, in fact, sunk intact. And what of the most famous Titanic legend of all—that the band played “Nearer My God to Thee” as the ship neared its end? It’s often claimed that this was a myth that took hold among survivors on the Carpathia and captivated the public in the aftermath of the disaster. None of the musicians survived to confirm or deny the story, but Harold Bride noted that the last tune he heard being played as he left the wireless cabin was “Autumn.” For a time this was believed to be a hymn tune by that name, but Walter Lord proposed in The Night Lives On that Bride must have been referring to “Songe d’Automne,” a popular waltz by Archibald Joyce that is listed in White Star music booklets of the period. Historian George Behe, however, has carefully studied the survivor accounts regarding the music that was heard during the sinking and has found credible evidence that “Nearer My God to Thee” and perhaps other hymns were played toward the end. Behe also recounts that the orchestra’s leader, Wallace Hartley, was once asked by a friend what he would do if he ever found himself on a sinking ship. Hartley replied, “I don’t think I could do better than play ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’ or ‘Nearer My God to Thee.’ ” The legendary hymn may not have been the very last tune played on the Titanic but it seems possible that it was heard on the sloping deck that night.

Seeing small pieces of a larger jigsaw puzzle in isolation, no matter how hi-def the picture, is insufficient to grapple with humanity’s greatest challenges. We have long known the laws of thermodynamics, but struggle to predict the spread of a forest fire. We know how cells work, but can’t predict the poetry that will be written by a human made up of them. The frog’s-eye view of individual parts is not enough. A healthy ecosystem needs biodiversity. Even now, even in endeavors that engender specialization unprecedented in history, there are beacons of breadth. Individuals who live by historian Arnold Toynbee’s words that “no tool is omnicompetent. There is no such thing as a master-key that will unlock all doors.” Rather than wielding a single tool, they have managed to collect and protect an entire toolshed, and they show the power of range in a hyperspecialized world.

I know three African priests—one Ugandan and two Nigerian—who are immensely educated and sophisticated scholars (linguists, philosophers, and historians all) and who are also unshakably convinced that miracles, magic, and spiritual warfare are manifestly real aspects of daily life, of which they themselves have had direct and incontrovertible experience on a number of occasions. All three are, of course, creatures of their cultures, no less than we are of ours; but I am not disposed to believe that their cultures are somehow more primitive or unreasoning than ours. It is true they come from nations that enjoy nothing like our economic and technological advantages; but, since these advantages are as likely to distract us from reality as to grant us any special insight into it, that fact scarcely rises to the level of irrelevance. Truth be told, there is no remotely plausible reason—apart from a preference for our own presuppositions over those of other peoples—why the convictions and experiences of an African polyglot and philosopher, whose pastoral and social labors oblige him to be engaged immediately in the concrete realities of hundreds of lives, should command less rational assent from us than the small, unproven, doctrinaire certitudes of persons who spend their lives in supermarkets and before television screens and immured in the sterile, hallucinatory seclusion of their private studies.

In the early 1980s, historian Jon Halliday asked Genaro Carnero Checa, a radical Peruvian writer and frequent traveler to the DPRK who published a book on the country in 1977 entitled Korea: Rice and Steel, his honest opinion of North Korea. Checa replied, “They fought the North Americans; they have done incredible things in the economy; it’s the only Third World country where everyone has good health, good education and good housing.” Halliday then asked Checa about his view of North Korea as a poet. Checa said, “It is the saddest, most miserable country I’ve ever been in in my life. As a poet, it strikes bleakness into my heart.” Checa’s statements reflect what many in the Third World thought of North Korea during the Cold War era. On one hand, this small nation overcame Japanese imperialism, brought the mighty U.S. military to a standstill in a three-year war, and rapidly rebuilt itself into a modern socialist state. For many struggling peoples in the Third World that recently overcame decades of Western colonialism and imperialism, North Korea’s economic recovery and military prowess were justifiably admirable. On the other hand, the oppressiveness and brutality of the North Korean political system undermined the appeal of the DPRK’s developmental model to the Third World. The growing inefficiencies of North Korea’s economic system also became too obvious to ignore. In fact, Kim Il Sung’s Third World diplomacy may have furthered the DPRK’s domestic economic troubles. A former member of the North Korean elite, Kang Myong- do, said after his defection to South Korea that “excessive aid to Third World countries had caused an actual worsening of North Korea’s already serious economic problems.

I’ll never cease to admire the skill if not the pragmatism of historians & mythographers who manage to blend a number of small truths & probabilities into one large lie. Which hungry hero worshippers swallow whole, without the reservation of a doubt.

Few historians have really delved into the spirit of the Brazilian people and their condition. To understand the condition of the real Brazil, it is necessary to understand that colonial isolationism remained. During the colonial period, Brazil was kept away from everything, so as not to attract the greed of other nations and conquerors. Preserved in this state of isolation, which was anything but splendid, the liberal and socialist ideas that brought about great changes in Europe and the rest of the world were always received here with due caution – which was not harmful. The rulers themselves, fearing losing power, made a point of granting small advantages to the people, and, by giving them crumbs with a great samba plot, they avoided greater losses. Brazilians are sentimental and, in the same way, they are irascible; therefore, they are easily manipulated. Isolation did not remain without costs, as it generated misery, delay and ignorance among the people. On the other hand, it produced a lazy, indolent and belligerent elite, averse to work, knowledge and the defense of the greatest national interests. In other words, keeping the Brazilian people in a state of minority was the price to pay for maintaining this tropical nobility.

Up to 95 percent of the original Native American population, estimated at roughly twenty million people, disappeared after the invasion of European colonizers. While there was direct violence toward Native Americans, many of these deaths can be attributed to the introduction of smallpox. Smallpox is a virus that is spread when one comes into contact with infected bodily fluids or contaminated objects such as clothing or blankets. The virus then finds its way into a person's lymphatic system. Within days of infection, large, painful pustules begin to erupt over the victim's skin. In school curriculums, this has often been taught as an unfortunate tragedy, an accidental side effect of trade, and therefore a reason to claim that the Europeans did not commit genocide. However, in recent years, many historians have recognized that the spreading of smallpox was an early form of biological warfare, one which was understood and used without mercy from at least the mid-1700s. Noted conversations among army officials include letters discussing the idea of "sending the Small Pox among those disaffected tribes" and using "every stratagem to reduce them." Another official, Henry Bouquet, wrote a letter that told his subordinates to "try to Innoculate [sic] the Indians, by means of Blankets, as well as to Try Every other Method, that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race." They followed through on their plan, giving two blankets and a handkerchief from a Smallpox Hospital alongside other gifts to seal an agreement of friendship between the local Native tribes and the men at Fort Pitt, located in what is now western Pennsylvania.

An archivist is like an historian; he has time-periods he’s faddy about; places, Kings and Queens. All the files here are related, they’re bound to be. Give me any file from next door; any file you want, I could trace you a path clean through the whole Registry, from Icelandic shipping rights to the latest guidance on gold prices. That’s the fascination of files; there’s nowhere to stop.

Eastern Europe is a land of small countries, wedged between great powers. . . It is a place that has long been dominated by empires. but it has not, for the most part, inherited an imperial frame of mind. Since the close of the nineteenth century, its politics have been dominated by nationalism of various stripes. Its history, by contrast, has been shaped most by the clash of feuding ideologies. But that is only the story of the past hundred years or so. Eastern Europe has a longer history and older traditions to draw on in formulating its future. Largely neglected by historians, there was an Eastern Europe that existed alongside the structures imposed by empire and independent of the hopes fostered by nationalism. This was a world of multiple faiths and languages, in which many parallel truths lived beside on another. It was a place of shared saints and intersecting stories, where folk cures and prophecies passed among neighbors, and sacred heroes donned one another's clothes. It coalesced gradually in the centuries following the introduction of monotheism -- the three great religions of the Book -- and the decline of paganism, which itself never disappeared completely but simply refashioned itself as the background of all later folk belief. This Eastern Europe was not a conscious creation, but the product of open spaces and centuries of benign neglect. This was not a place where different people deliberately chose to live side by side, but where they did so out of long and practiced habit, enshrined more by custom than by law. Inequality -- especially of class -- was part of the bedrock below its foundation. But despite its not being built around principles of universal rights, this order did have its own considerable advantages. Chief among them were plurality and multiplicity -- truly impressive virtues, especially if one knows what followed in their wake.

No wonder then that church historian Mark Noll comments, “Much of the influence of Lutheranism around the world can be traced to the success of this catechism in expressing the profound truths of the faith in a language that all can understand.”18

between 1586 and 1607, the historian William Camden wrote that the “small market-town” of Stratford-upon-Avon owed “all its consequences to two natives of it. They are John de Stratford, later archbishop of Canterbury, who built the church, and Hugh Clopton, later mayor of London, who built the Clopton Bridge across the Avon.” Camden was clearly aware of the poet Shakespeare—he referred to him elsewhere as one of “the most pregnant wits of our time”—but he apparently did not regard Stratford as the poet’s origin.

as scientists no less than historians should note, that training in the writing of good English is indispensable to any learned man who expects to make his learning count for what it ought to count in the effect on his fellow men. The outdoor naturalist, the faunal naturalist, who devotes himself primarily to a study of the habits and of the life-histories of birds, beasts, fish, and reptiles, and who can portray truthfully and vividly what he has seen, could do work of more usefulness than any mere collector, in this upper Paraguay country. The work of the collector is indispensable; but it is only a small part of the work that ought to be done; and after collecting has reached a certain point the work of the field observer with the gift for recording what he has seen becomes of far more importance. The long days spent riding through the swamp, the "pantanal," were pleasant and interesting. Several times we saw the tamandua bandeira, the giant ant-bear. Kermit shot one, because the naturalists eagerly wished for a second specimen; afterward we were relieved of all necessity to molest the strange, out-of-date creatures. It was a surprise to us to find them habitually frequenting the open marsh. They were always on muddy ground, and in the papyrus-swamp we found them in several inches of water. The stomach is thick-walled, like a gizzard; the stomachs of those we shot contained adult and larval ants, chiefly termites, together with plenty of black mould and fragments of leaves, both green and dry. Doubtless the earth and the vegetable matter had merely been taken incidentally, adhering to the viscid tongue when it was thrust into the ant masses. Out in the open marsh the tamandua could neither avoid observation, nor fight effectively, nor make good its escape by flight.

The small farm, a historian observed, was an unsurpassed school for boyhood but an intellectual prison for manhood.

Because this life is fragile, and we have all lost something great or small... We are all exiles April Chu-Lin. Take it from a historian, it is not what you know about the past that matters, it is how you plan to live with it; to use it. Godspeed, Captain." Chu-Lin remained, looking after the brown-clad figure in the cold, empty hall. She wondered who he was talking to, himself or her... or perhaps the whole of a dying world.

I don’t ask people about socialism, I want to know about love, jealousy, childhood, old age. Music, dances, hairdos. The myriad sundry details of a vanished way of life. It’s the only way to chase the catastrophe into the contours of the ordinary and try to tell a story. Make some small discovery. It never ceases to amaze me how interesting everyday life really is. There is an endless number of human truths. History is concerned solely with the facts; emotions are outside of its realm of interest. In fact, it’s considered improper to admit feelings into history. But I look at the world as a writer and not a historian. I am fascinated by people.

In Paris explanations come in a predictable sequence, no matter what is being explained. First comes the explanation in terms of the unique, romantic individual, then the explanation in terms of ideological absolutes, and then the explanation in terms of the futility of all explanation. So, for instance, if your clothes dryer breaks down and you want to get the people from BHV—the strange Sears, Roebuck of Paris— to come fix it, you will be told, first, that only one man knows how it works and he cannot be found (explanation in terms of the gifts of the romanticized individual); next, that it cannot be fixed for a week because of a store policy (explanation in terms of ideological necessity); and, finally, that you are perfectly right to find all this exasperating, but nothing can be done, because it is in the nature of things for a dryer to break down, dryers are like that (futility of explanation itself). "They are sensitive machines; they are ill suited to the task; no one has ever made one successfully," the store bureaucrat in charge of service says, sighing. "C'est normal." And what works small works big too. The same sequence that explains the broken dryer also governs the explanations of the French Revolution that have been offered by the major French historians. "Voltaire did all this!" was de La Villette's explanation (only one workman); an inevitable fight between the bourgeoisie and the aristocrats, the Marxists said (store policy); until, finally, Foucault announced that there is nothing really worth explaining in the coming of the Reign of Terror, since everything in Western culture, seen properly, is a reign of terror (all dryers are like that).

The conditioning of the populace must be directed by a small corps of expert technicians in the employ of an oligarchy, with only a limited number of assistants who are fully aware of their task. When we consider the British and Americans (as distinct from resident aliens), we may be certain that most of the teachers who inject illusions into the minds of the young, many of the journalists who manufacture tripe for the press and radio, and even quite a few of the “social scientists” who concoct sophistries for the half-educated, are not conscious of what they are doing, being themselves deceived. And the individuals who suspect that they are deluding their victims probably soothe their consciences with assurances that they are engaged in noble work for “democracy” and their salaries. Thus, although it is true that the manufacture of propaganda, like the manufacture of shoes or stoves, requires today a larger number of technicians and other employees than were needed even a few decades ago, the number concerned in its production is relatively small and the employers even fewer, so that historians still think in terms of a small group engaged in conscious and calculated deception of a great majority.