Best 293 quotes in «american history quotes» category

When the mother was delivered into the trader's hands, she said, "You promised to treat me well." To which he replied, "You have let your tongue run too far; damn you!" She had forgotten that it was a crime to tell who was the father of her child.

While slaveowners worked vigorously to allow slaves only so much biblical teaching as to make them good, docile, submissive slaves, even the most basic moral elements of Christian truth proved revolutionary. This phenomenon arises clearly with the commandment against theft. Reading the proslavery defenses from the antebellum era, one encounters consistent references to slaves stealing and "pilfering" from their masters' stores and livestock, etc. This is always held up as evidence of their incapacity for civilization. Yet it was hardly any lack of capacity; it was resistance and restitution in their keen understanding of their masters' hypocrisy. "While white preachers repeatedly urged 'Don't steal,' slaves just as persistently denied that this commandment applied to them, since they themselves were stolen property." Former slave Josephine Howard retorted to those slaveholders who preached against theft: "[T]hen why did de white folks steal my mammy and her mammy? . . . Dat de sinfulles' stealin' dey is." A Virginian slave preached back at his master, "You white folks set the bad example of stealing—you stole us from Africa, and not content with that, if any got free here, you stole them afterward, and so we are made slaves." Former Georgian slave George Womble agreed: "Slaves were taught to steal by their masters." [...] It is no wonder that whole audiences full of slaves were known to get up and leave the preaching services of missionaries when they began to preach on stealing. They simply could not stomach the hypocrisy.

While under the Spanish flag, the Crown rigorously controlled the number of slaves allowed into Cuba and charged the settlers a 20% royalty for each slave they imported. In 1537, Havana was invaded and briefly occupied by the French. On April 6, 1538, Hernando de Soto with about 950 men and horses on ten ships sailed from Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Spain to Santiago de Cuba where he took over as the Governor of Cuba. From Santiago, he sailed around Cuba to Havana with a nine-ship convoy and set up a base which was administered by his wife and used as a stepping-stone to Florida. Anticipating this expedition, he sent Juan de Añasco with two ships to find a suitable landing site along the west coast of Florida. Añasco, who was Hernando de Soto’s scout, returned with four Indians who told fabricated stories about gold in Florida, which De Soto accepted as true. After some months preparing for the expedition, De Soto left Cuba and arrived at Shaw’s Point near present-day Bradenton, Florida, where he started his long trek in search of gold and silver.

[whiteness] has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white—Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish—and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myth. I cannot call it. As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies. The new people are not original in this. Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much. And it is so easy to look away, to live with the fruits of our history and to ignore the great evil done in all of our names. But you and I have never truly had that luxury.

Won't reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say - that American propserity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.

Will" Rogers, known as "Oklahoma's Favorite Son,” was born on November 4, 1879, in what was then considered Indian Territory. His career included being a cowboy, writer, vaudeville performer, movie star and political wit. He poked fun at politicians, government programs, gangsters and current events, in a home spun and folksy way, making him one of the most idolized people in America. He became the highest paid Hollywood movie star at the time. Will Rogers died on August 15, 1935 with his friend and pilot Wiley Post, when their small airplane crashed in Alaska. He once said that he wanted his tombstone to read "I joked about every prominent man of my time, but I never met a man I didn’t like.

With World War I over, the decade prior to my birth was universally recognized as the “Roaring Twenties.” Many rejoiced, with mostly young, wealthy people indulging in wine, women and song. Promiscuous sexual behavior and the social use of alcohol became normal to the liberal thinkers who gathered in the bohemian sections of the world’s leading cities. Although political unrest still existed, most people enjoyed the peaceful years that followed the horror of World War I. The United States, however, has always been a more structured, puritanical and religious country. From the time of the Pilgrims, spirituality and moderation has prevailed. In the United States, the concept of abstinence was advanced by the American Temperance Society, also known as the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance. This activist group was established on February 13, 1826, in Boston, Massachusetts, and considered the concept of outlawing alcohol to be progressive. The United States Senate first proposed the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, with the intent of banning the use of alcohol. After passage by the House and Senate, on December 18, 1917, the proposed amendment was submitted to the states for ratification. On January 16, 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified, with an effective date one year later on January 17, 1920. The Volstead Act, passed on October 28, 1919, specified the details for the enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment. A total of 1,520 Federal Prohibition agents, having police powers, were assigned to enforce this unpopular law. Many people, ignoring this new law, partied at the many renowned illegal speakeasies, many of which were run by the Mafia. This ban on alcohol proved to be contentious, difficult to enforce, and an infringement on people’s personal rights. Still, due to political pressure, it continued until March 22, 1933, when President Franklin Roosevelt signed an amendment to the Constitution, known as the Cullen-Harrison Act, which allowed for the manufacture and sale of watery 3.2% beer. It took over a decade from its inception before the Eighteenth Amendment was finally repealed on December 5, 1933, when the Twenty-First Amendment to the Constitution was adopted.

Wild Times Since Mexico accepted communism as a legitimate political party during the 1920’s and allowed refugees greater flexibility of thought, it became a haven from persecution. Moreover, living in Mexico was less costly than most countries, the weather was usually sunny and no one objected to the swinging lifestyle that many of the expats engaged in. It was for these reasons that Julio Mella from Cuba, Leon Trotsky from Russia and others sought refuge there. It also attracted many actors, authors and artists from the United States, many of whom were Communist or, at the very least were “Fellow Travelers” and had leftist leanings. Although the stated basic reason for the Communist Party’s existence was to improve conditions for the working class, it became a hub for the avant-garde, who felt liberated socially as well as politically. The bohemian enclave of Coyoacán now a part of Mexico City, where Frida Kahlo was born, was located just east of San Angel which at the time was a district of the ever expanding City. It also became the gathering place for personalities such as the American actor Orson Welles, the beautiful actress Dolores del Río, the famous artist Diego Rivera and his soon-to-be-wife, “Frida,” who became and is still revered as the illustrious matriarch of Mexico.

Yet, if the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past, American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist. This is one of the greatest errors Americans can make. The identity they fought so hard to protect has, by virtue of that battle, undergone a change: Americans are as unlike any other white people in the world as it is possible to be. I do not think, for example, that it is too much to suggest that the American vision of the world-which allows so little reality, generally speaking, for any of the darker forces in human life, which tends until today to paint moral issues in glaring black and white owes a great deal to the battle waged by Americans to maintain between themselves and black men a human separation which could not be bridged. It is only now beginning to be borne in on us, very faintly, it must be admitted, very slowly, and very much against our will--that this vision of the world is dangerously inaccurate, and perfectly useless. For it protects our moral high-mindedness at the terrible expense of weakening our grasp of reality. People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.

American history is not something dead and over. It is always alive,always growing, always unfinished.

You're a Black educated fool, son. These white folk have newspapers, magazines, radios, spokesmen to get their ideas across. If they want to tell the world a lie, they can tell it so well that it becomes the truth; and if I tell them you're lying, they'll tell the world even if you prove you're telling the truth. Because it's the kind of lie they want to hear.

American history is a quagmire, and the more one knows, the quaggier the mire gets.

A trillion dollars spent, 2,000 American lives lost - Afghanistan is the longest war in American history. But you don't hear a word about it.

At various periods in American history, people get pretty rambunctious when it comes to our democratic debate.

Barack Obama is facing a financial emergency on a grander scale. Yet his approach has been to engage in one of the biggest peacetime spending binges in American history.

By looking into more details of American history, we can make more sense of what's happening today.

Bill and Hillary Clinton are the most investigated couple in American history - now the most thoroughly exonerated couple in American history.

Donald Verrilli has argued 37 cases in five years on behalf of the [Barak] Obama administration. Many of them turned out to be truly landmark cases. He is the seventh-longest-serving solicitor general in American history.

Cherishing Columbus is a characteristic of white history, not American history.

Donald Trump will be a tragedy, a sad joke in American history.

For a long time in American history, people didn't even come up before the Senate. They didn't come before the Judiciary Committee, and up until about 1923, something like that.

Hurricane Katrina is without question the worst natural disaster in American history.

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are the most disliked and untrusted candidates for president in American history.

I don't know anything about American history or presidents. I don't know what tailgating is! I've never been to an Olive Garden!

I do think Donald Trump would be a catastrophic turn in American history.

I hated the lost colony; in second grade, we were doing American History, and they said, We don't know what happened to them. That drove me nuts. That lost colony drove me crazy.

I grew up in the South, so a huge part of our American History education revolved around the Civil War.

I see Donald Trump as a phenomenon of an expression of certain fears, certain resentments, that have been a running thread in American history.

I love thinking about American history, thinking about LA history. I love brooding on crime.

I'm a history geek and I love American history. It's so bizarre and so problematic and I love the many conundrums that it represents. You can go down so many black holes.

I'm sure that a previous generation of Jews who published radical newspapers and journals would be critical of [David] Simon's projects. These were left wingers who suffered casualties in some of bloodiest strikes in American history.

I'm working on restoring a cabinet over the obstruction of Senate Democrats. It will be one of the great cabinets ever assembled in American history.

In my totally unscientific yet enthusiastic survey of Communal Experiments Throughout American History, I've discovered that the thing most likely to break up said experiments is: Sex, all that murky, dark, dirty gunk simmering beneath human relations.

I think so. 9/11 has been a turning point in American history, there's no doubt about that.

I think one of the most pivotal moments in modern American history was Donald Trump's immediate withdraw from TPP.

I understood....that in my own life I represented a whole period of American history.

I used to teach. I quote American history and I love words. I've read the dictionary I don't know how many times throughout my life. People say, "You read the dictionary?" I say, "Yes, and you can really believe it.

So many people of color who made major contributions to American history have been trapped in the purgatory of history.

Jimmy Carter will go down in American history as 'the president who lost Iran,'

Many of the ugly pages of American history have been obscured and forgotten

Obama has seen to the passage of the most radical legislation in recent American history and so-called 'progressives' should be thanking him for it - even as many of the rest of us rear in horror from its implications.

President Obama is the most successful food stamp president in American history. I would like to be the most successful paycheck president in American history.

the better angels of our nature

The conversation seemed just as boring and forgettable as details of American history around 1805, for example.

The Declaration of Independence is a sacred part of American history.

The frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.

The Obama administration and the Democratic Congress have taken the biggest lurch to the left in policy in American history. There've been no - no Congress, no administration that has run this far to the left in such a small period of time. And there is a reaction to that.

There have been times throughout American history where what is right is not the same as what is legal. Sometimes to do the right thing you have to break the law.

There's not much place for the loyalists - especially the loyalists who left - in standard American history.

There was a time in American history when almost every white person knew who Aretha Franklin was.