history

All history is modern history.

History will remember him as a savage, but that's because we write the histories.

Love your children, for they are the seeds that will make this city bloom.

Interesting, I thought, how quickly history becomes stories rather than reality; one step already from the truth.

Misogyny was born of fear of women.

Calcutta has still not recovered from history: people mourn the past, and abhor it deeply.

Isn__ that the fantasy? If I go back in time, knowing what people back then didn__ know, then I can change history! But history made you what you are. And it__ bigger than any one man.

On Sunday evenings, there was a comparatively vast array of radio shows from which to choose. Frequently I would lie in my bed with my father, who would pull the covers over our heads and pretend that we were in a cave. This is how we would listen to shows such as Jack Benny, The Great Gildersleeve with Harold Peary, The Fred Allen Show, and The Edgar Bergen Show. As a ventriloquist, Edgar Bergen had Charlie McCarthy and the slow-witted Mortimer Snerd as puppets. For us the last show of the evening was always Your Hit Parade sponsored by Lucky Strike Cigarettes, starring Snooky Lanson, Gisele MacKenzie and a host of other well-known singers of that period. Although my father was a strict disciplinarian, on Sunday evenings he usually relaxed things and we would enjoy our time listening to the radio together.

I am not so different in my history of abandonment from anyone else after all. We have all been split away from each other, the earth, ourselves.

Some biblical scholars believe that the story of the fall from the Garden of Eden was a cultural memory of the transition from foraging to agriculture: __n the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread._ 79 So why did our foraging ancestors leave Eden? For many, it was never an explicit choice: they had multiplied themselves into a Malthusian trap in which the fat of the land could no longer support them, and they had to grow their food themselves. The states emerged only later, and the foragers who lived at their frontiers could either be absorbed into them or hold out in their old way of life. For those who had the choice, Eden may have been just too dangerous. A few cavities, the odd abscess, and a couple of inches in height were a small price to pay for a fivefold better chance of not getting speared

The very notion of Great Britain's "greatness" is bound up with Empire,' the cultural theorist, Stuart Hall, once wrote: 'Euro-scepticism and littel Englander nationalism could hardly survive if people understood whose sugar flowed through English blood , and rotted English teeth.

She loved old things. The brown-brick place was a survivor of the 1907 earthquake and fire, and proudly bore a plaque from the historical society. The building had a haunted history- it was the site of a crime of passion- but Tess didn't mind. She'd never been superstitious.The apartment was filled with items she'd collected through the years, simply because she liked them or was intrigued by them. There was a balance between heirloom and kitsch. The common thread seemed to be that each object had a story, like a pottery jug with a bas-relief love story told in pictures, in which she'd found a note reading, "Long may we run. -Gilbert." Or the antique clock on the living room wall, each of its carved figures modeled after one of the clockmaker's twelve children. She favored the unusual, so long as it appeared to have been treasured by someone, once upon a time. Her mail spilled from an antique box containing a pigeon-racing counter with a brass plate engraved from a father to a son. She hung her huge handbag on a wrought iron finial from a town library that had burned and been rebuilt in a matter of weeks by an entire community.Other people's treasures captivated her. They always had, steeped in hidden history, bearing the nicks and gouges and fingerprints of previous owners. She'd probably developed the affinity from spending so much of her childhood in her grandmother's antique shop.

It is hard to remember.___emember what?___ll that goes into the making of any one moment we live. There are things one must try to remember. Do you know what is the hardest thing to remember?___o,_ Adam said.__ell, I__l tell you, my son,_ Aaron Blaustein said. __he hardest thing to remember is that other men are men._ He leaned to set his cup down. __ut that,_ he said, __s the only way you can be a man yourself. Can be anything.

Sadly, racial, ethnic, and cultural hatred and intolerance are not just history, they are current events.

History is the hidden map of who, where and how we are today.

We have the right to demand that if we find men against whom there is not only suspicion, but almost a certainty that they have had collusion with men whose interests were in conflict with the interests of the public, they shall, at least, be required to bring positive facts with which to prove there has not been such collusion; and they ought themselves to have been the first to demand such an investigation." -Teddy Roosevelt

What was it like to live amidst such machines, to be familiar with them, to have them shape one's earliest intuitions about machinery: how it works, what it does, how it compares to living creatures?

Many of the people I write about were deliberately left out of the history books that we were forced to read in school. For me, that history was "written wrong" and needed to be corrected. My intention was to make them visible so they could be role models for others. To show how each, in his or her own way, dribbled gracefully around that obstacle in the narrow corridor.