people-by-ethnicity

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April 10, 2026

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April 10, 2026

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"Like the Jews in Central and Eastern Europe, the Armenians were doubly vulnerable: not only a religious minority, but also a relatively wealthy group, disproportionately engaged in commerce. Like the Jews, they were heavily, though by no means exclusively, concentrated in one border region: the six vilayets (provinces) of Bitlis, Van, Erzurum, Mamuretulaziz, Diyarbakir and Sivas, on the Ottoman Empire's eastern frontier. Like the Jews, although more credibly, the Armenians could be identified as sympathizing with an external threat, namely Russia, historically the Ottoman Empire's most dangerous foe. Like the Serbs, they had their extremists, who aimed at independence through violence. There had in fact been state-sponsored attacks against them before. In the mid-i890s irregular Kurdish troops had been unleashed against Armenian villages as the Ottoman authorities tried to reassert the Armenians' subordinate status as infidel dhimmis, or non-Muslim citizens. The American ambassador estimated the number of people killed at more than 37,000. There was a fresh outbreak of violence at Adana in 1909, though this was not instigated by the Young Turks. The murderous campaign launched against the Armenians from 1915 to 1918 was qualitatively different, however; so much so that it is now widely acknowledged to have been the first true genocide. With good reason, the American consul in Smyrna declared that it 'surpasse[d] in deliberate and long-protracted horror and in extent anything that has hitherto happened in the history of the world'."

- Armenians

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"In the many Indian wars the causes an provocations have not always come from the Indian. While the nation at times supplied the Indian with firearms, ammunition, and scalping knives, it did not employ him against white foes, except in the War of the rebellion, when Indians were enlisted as soldiers on both sides. Indian soldiers and scouts have been employed against Indians, but never, with the exception noted, against whites. The amount expended in Indian wars from 1776 to June 30, 1890, can only be estimated. The several Indian wars after 1776; including the war of 1812, in the west and the northwest, the Creek, Black Hawk, and Seminole wars, up to 1860 were bloody and costly. Except when engaged in war with great Britain, Mexico, or during the rebellion (1861-1865), the United States army was almost entirely used for the Indian service, and stationed largely in the Indian country or among the frontier. In 1890, 70 per cent of the army was stationed west of the Missouri river, 66 per cent being in the Indian country. It will be fair to estimate, taking out the years of foreign wars with England, namely, 1812-1815, $66,614,912.34, and with Mexico, 1846-1848, $73,941,735.12, and the rebellion, 1861-1865, and reconstruction, 1865-1870, $3,374,359,360.02, that at least, three-fourths of the total expense of the army is chargeable, directly or indirectly, to the Indians. During our foreign wars and the War of the Rebellion many of the Indian tribes were at war with the United States, and others were a constant danger, a large force being necessary to hold them in subjection; but expense on this account is dropped from the eshuate. The total expense of the army of the United States from March 4, 1789, to June 30, 1890, was $4,725,521,495; deducting $3,514,911,007.48 for foreign wars and the War of the Rebellion, the remainder is $1,210,610,4487.52. Two-thirds of this sum, it is estimated, was expended for Indian wars and for army services incidental to the Indians, namely, $807,073,658.34 (cost of fortifications, posts, and stations being deducted). Adding the expense of the civil administration $259,944,082.34, we have an estimated cost of the Indians to the United States from July 4, 1776 to June 30, 1890, of $1,067,017,740.68 aside from the amount reimbursed to states for their expenses in war with Indians and aside from pensions."

- Native Americans in the United States

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"Since the advent of the European in the present United States there have been almost constant wars between whites and Indians, outbreaks, or massacres, beginning on the Pacific side in in 1539 and on the Atlantic side after 1600. The wars and outbreaks arose from various causes: from resistance by the Indian to the white man’s occupation of his land; from the white man’s murder of Indians; from the Indian’s murderous disposition; from national neglect and failure to keep treaties and solemn promises; from starvation, and so on. Within the past 100 years the Indians’ chief complaint was against the acts of individuals; when the reservation system became general the complaints changes from charges against settlers to charges of breach of faith against the United States, many of which in the past 20 years have been confirmed by investigation. The authorities as to these wars are numerous and much scattered; so much so that it would require years to collect the data to make a history of Indian wars. No such history has been written, and probably none will be. Prior to the organization of the government of the United States in 1789 individual companies of adventurers, various European governments, and the colonies were engaged in almost constant bloodshed with the Indians. War seems to have been a normal condition of a great portion of the American race; whether for good or conquest, it matters not. By their owns statements made to Europeans at their first coming war was one of the occupations of the Indians, if not their chief occupation. Indian tribal wars must have been bloody, as they seldom took prisoners; at least this was the rule in several nations."

- Native Americans in the United States

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"The fate of North American Indian tribes frequently resembled that of the Australian Aborigines. European settlers arrived on their native territories and claimed the land for their own. When the Indians resisted, the settlers, supported by their colonial governments, or their national, state, and local governments, were quick to drive out or kill the Indians and their families or to force them onto reservations to live out their lives in alien surroundings. As in the case of the Aborigines, children were taken from Indian families, women were kidnapped and raped, promises of peace were made and broken, and claims of racial and civilizational superiority were used by the settlers to justify their land grabbing and their killing. North American native peoples, like the Aborigines, were highly susceptible to the diseases brought to their homelands by the settlers and prone to the abuse of alcohol, which the settlers purposely employed to undermine their ability to resist. Those settlers who raised livestock, primarily cows and sheep, tended to have the sharpest conlicts with the Indians, provoking massacres and outright warfare between Indian tribes and government and militia formations. The tendency of the North American settlers to see the Indians as hopelessly primitive and incapable of marshaling the resources of the land gave them “reason” to deprive those Indians of the most desirable lands and territories."

- Native Americans in the United States

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"In the 150 years or so leading up to the establishment of Brothertown, Northeastern tribes had developed a complex web of relationships with the British Crown. Sometimes diplomacy was a matter of straightforward treaty-making, sovereign to sovereign. Occasionally, tribes affirmed allegiance to Great Britain, but this was almost always done provisionally: “upon condition of His Majesties’ royal protection, and righting us of what wrong[s] us, or may be done unto us,” as one Narragansett declaration from 1643 put it. The advantage of acknowledging the jurisdiction of a distant monarch was that it gave the tribes legal standing equal to (or better than) that of colonists. Being “subjects unto the same King” in the years before the American Revolution, as the historian Jenny Hale Pulsipher has shown, was typically better than squaring off directly against colonial greed and malice. From this point of view, the Revolution was a disaster for Native people, because it deprived them of one of their most effective legal strategies. Even so, the tribes of the Northeastern Seaboard expressed little nostalgia for the British after their defeat. Although Brothertown’s parent tribes sometimes benefited from the protection of the British sovereign, they never aspired to full participation in the commonwealth. Nor did they see themselves as bound by “social contracts” of the kind theorized by European philosophers. Among tribal nations, political allegiances were fluid. A sachem (an Algonquian term for “chief”) who betrayed the interest of his tribe could easily find himself rejected by his people."

- Native Americans in the United States

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"Our system is to live in perpetual peace with the Indians, to cultivate an affectionate attachment from them, by everything just and liberal which we can do for them within the bounds of reason, and by giving them effectual protection against wrongs from our own people. The decrease of game rendering their subsistence by hunting insufficient, we wish to draw them to agriculture, to spinning and weaving. The latter branches they take up with great readiness, because they fall to women, who gain by quitting the labors of the field for those which are exercised within doors. When they withdraw themselves to the culture of a small piece of land, they will perceive how useless to them are their extensive forests, and will be willing to pare them off from time to time in exchange for necessaries for their farms and families. To promote this disposition to exchange lands, which they have to spare and we want, for necessaries, which we have to spare and they want, we shall push our trading uses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands. At our trading houses, too, we mean to sell so low as merely to repay us cost and charges, so as neither to lessen or enlarge our capital. This is what private traders cannot do, for they must gain; they will consequently retire from the competition, and we shall thus get clear of this pest without giving offence or umbrage to the Indians. In this way our settlements will gradually circumscribe and approach the Indians, and they will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States, or remove beyond the Mississippi. The former is certainly the termination of their history most happy for themselves; but, in the whole course of this, it is essential to cultivate their love. As to their fear, we presume that our strength and their weakness is now so visible that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them, and that all our liberalities to them proceed from motives of pure humanity only. Should any tribe be foolhardy enough to take up the hatchet at any time, the seizing the whole country of that tribe, and driving them across the Mississippi, as the only condition of peace, would be an example to others, and a furtherance of our final consolidation."

- Native Americans in the United States

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"Our conduct toward these people is deeply interesting to our national character. Their present condition, contrasted with what they once were, makes a most powerful appeal to our sympathies. Our ancestors found them the uncontrolled possessors of these vast regions. By persuasion and force they have been made to retire from river to river and from mountain to mountain, until some of the tribes have become extinct and others have left but remnants to preserve for a while their once terrible names. Surrounded by the whites with their arts of civilization, which by destroying the resources of the savage doom him to weakness and decay, the fate of the Mohegan, the Narragansett, and the Delaware is fast overtaking the Choctaw, the Cherokee, and the Creek. That this fate surely awaits them if they remain within the limits of the states does not admit of a doubt. Humanity and national honor demand that every effort should be made to avert so great a calamity. It is too late to inquire whether it was just in the United States to include them and their territory within the bounds of new states, whose limits they could control. That step can not be retraced. A state can not be dismembered by Congress or restricted in the exercise of her constitutional power. But the people of those states and of every state, actuated by feelings of justice and a regard for our national honor, submit to you the interesting question whether something can not be done, consistently with the rights of the states, to preserve this much-injured race."

- Native Americans in the United States

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