Historians From The United States

"Constructive critique is a sign of the utmost intellectual respect."

"Through the scattering, thinning mist the horizon was magically filling with ships—ships of every size and description, ships that casually maneuvered back and forth as though they had been there for hours. There appeared to be thousands of them. It was a ghostly armada that somehow had appeared from nowhere. Pluskat stared in frozen disbelief, speechless, moved as he had never been before in his life. At that moment the world of the good soldier Pluskat began falling apart. He says in those first moments he knew, calmly and surely, that "this was the end for Germany." "Block," said Pluskat, "it’s the invasion. There must be ten thousand ships out there." Block said, "What way are these ships heading?" Pluskat, phone in hand, looked out the aperture of the bunker and reported, "Right for me.""

"What I write about is not war but the courage of man."

"Now [Gerhard] Cordes could see more shapes. The din of motors and clank of treads was tremendous. The earth trembled. He picked up a Panzerfaust. From behind came an abrupt, heavy-throated chorus; 88-mm shells screeched overhead and smashed into the first tanks. Flames shot up, parts of metal and shell fragments rained over the foxholes. At least six tanks were on fire, but others kept coming on and on. In the reddish glare they stood out with clarity and were helpless before the withering fire of the big guns. Red Army infantrymen began erupting from the middle of this massive conflagration. There must have been 800, and they scrambled up the hill shouting, Cordes thought, like madmen. The airmen fired rifles and burp guns, and hundreds of Russians toppled over. The rest came on, still yelling. More fell and at last, like a great wave that has shattered its strength against a jetty, the attackers fell back."

"I have been in Russia several days and have listened to many toasts. I have heard the virtues of every Allied ruler, every prominent marshal, general, admiral, and commander toasted. I have yet to hear a toast to the most important Russian in World War II. Gentlemen, will you please drink with me to the common soldier of the great Red Army."

"Under the command of General Eisenhower, Allied naval forces, supported by strong air forces, began landing Allied armies this morning on the northern coast of France."

"I think that in a society that requires people to be more and more educated, the college degree is almost equivalent to what the high school degree was 25 or 30 years ago. (2016)"

"Urban education in the nineteenth century did more to industrialize humanity than to humanize industry."

"The academy never stood apart from American slavery—in fact, it stood beside church and state as the third pillar of a civilization built on bondage."

"Australia to the world lay hid in night: God said, "Let Grattan be!" and all was light."

"The Australian–American policy must be flung into the ring where the Continental Americans and the Imperial Americans do battle."

"In that time he has done as much as, and probably more than any other person, to explain Australia to his fellow countrymen. In addition he has played an important part in explaining Australia to itself."

"He loved talking: he loved to be a Dr Johnson in the New World."

"[C]ulturally there is a vast amount of hard work to be done before the average Australian has ordinary tolerance and understanding of American life and thought."

"What it takes, at least from my experience, to do excellent work is long hours (not a hardship for me, I love my work), persistence, the willingness to take risks, to accept criticism, to stand by what you think if upon consideration, you believe you’re right, even if no one else believes it, and to head out into unknown places."

"All successful grant applicants have gotten rejections. The way to guarantee that you won't get a grant is to not apply."

"The way to advance in the field of history is to do excellent research and writing and then get it published. This takes lots of time and the more experience you have, the easier it gets. But it is never easy."

"Then there is the nuclear option: Gertrude Himmelfarb... this great doyenne of reactionary history has somehow inveigled the Prime Minister [Gordon Brown] under her spell. Her specialism is Victorian attitudes to poverty and she herself has long adopted the lofty mien of a lady bountiful: for Professor Himmelfarb, the problems of the poor are always questions of morality and character, not class or condition. No doubt this appeals to Mr Brown's Puritan ethos just as her championing of the British enlightenment above the continental version tickles his Euroscepticism."

"They were also liberal virtues. By putting a premium on ordinary virtues attainable by ordinary people, the ethos located responsibility within each individual. It was no longer only the exceptional, the heroic individual who was the master of his fate; every individual could be his own master. So far from promoting social control, the ethos had the effect of promoting self-control. This was at the heart of Victorian morality: self-control, self-help, self-reliance, self-discipline. A liberal society, the Victorians believed, depended upon a moral citizenry. The stronger the voluntary exercise of morality on the part of each individual—the more internalized that morality—the weaker need be the external, coercive instruments of the state. For the Victorians, morality served as a substitute for law, just as law was a substitute for force."

"These values, moreover, were consciously shared by the most radical British workers. The memoirs of those involved in Chartism, a working-class reform movement, provide poignant testimony to their efforts to remain hard-working, sober, frugal, clean, in short, respectable, despite all temptations to the contrary. There were groups within the movement—the Temperance Chartists and Education Chartists—who made this their main concern. Indeed the central tenet of Chartism, universal suffrage, was based on just this claim to respectability. The argument for political equality depended on the argument for natural equality, a common human nature—common values, aspirations, and capacities."

"To the degree Victorians succeeded in "bourgeoisifying" the ethos, they also democratized it. That ethos was not, to be sure, an exalted or heroic one. Hard work, sobriety, frugality, foresight—these were modest, mundane virtues, even lowly ones. But they were virtues within the capacity of everyone; they did not assume any special breeding, or status, or talent, or valor, or grace—or even money. They were common virtues within the reach of common people. They were, so to speak, democratic virtues."

"Such values as thrift, prudence, diligence, temperance, and self-reliance were indeed bourgeois ones. But they were also classical ones; they were hardly unfamiliar to the Greeks. And they were also religious ones; it was, after all, from the Jews and Christians that the Puritans derived them."

"The desire to transcend the human condition is, in most religious traditions, an invitation to heresy. In politics it is an invitation to tyranny, as we seek a perfection that inevitably eludes us and as we redouble our efforts to attain the unattainable."

"So whenever I give a lecture, somebody from the audience gets up and says, "Dr Kramer, ... how do you know how to pronounce these words?" And my answer then is as follows: If one of the dead Sumerians that Leonard Woolley dug up at Ur, if he was miraculously resurrected and came into the room and he heard me say, [speaks Sumerian], he would say: "That man Kramer, he’s doing very well; he’s pronouncing his words and I understand them. But my goodness does he have a Jewish accent.""

"The Sumerologist is one of the narrowest of specialists in the highly specialized academic halls of learning, a well-nigh perfect example of the man who "knows mostest about the leastest.""

"You have to remember that the items that have been stolen from the Museum or have been plundered, are not owned by only one person and usually not only by Afghans. It is usually one or two Afghans with five or six Pakistani partners. And the underground stolen art business in Pakistan is just as well organised and it is just as dangerous as the drug business. In fact, I have heard some people say that as far as the end-result is concerned, it’s even more profitable than drugs."

"Dupree’s analysis clearly suggests that ‘the museum was not plundered by rampaging gangs of illiterate Mujahideen’. The looters in 1993 were discriminating in what they took and apparently had both the time and the knowledge to select the most attractive, saleable pieces. For example, they removed from wooden display mounts only the central figures (depicting voluptuous ladies standing in doorways) of the delicate Begram ivory carvings. It is also telling that although some 2000 books and journals remain in the library, volumes with illustrations of the museum's best pieces are missing."

"While I have seen a few museum pieces for sale in Afghanistan, there are a number of artifacts on the market that have recently been dug up in Afghanistan. Mujaheedin commanders in all parts of the country are involved in this illicit activity, most notably in the east near the Hadda museum. An important Buddhist pilgrimage site in the second through seventh centuries, Hadda has been totally stripped of its exquisite clay sculptures in the Gandhara style, which combines Bactrian, Greco-Roman, and Indian elements. Looted artifacts from Faryab and Balkh provinces in the north allegedly include jewel- encrusted golden crowns and statues, orbs (locally described as ‘soccer balls’) studded with emeralds and all manner of exotic ephemera, as well as fluted marble columns similar to those found at Ai Khanoum in the northeastern province of Takhar. These are being carted away to embellish the houses of the newly powerful, according to witnesses."

"Afghanistan never did have any monuments on the world heritage list. As far as I know, nine different monuments have been nominated over time for inclusion on the world heritage list. The world heritage committee just opened their meeting for this year, and there is one Afghan monument, the minaret at Jam, being considered this time. Because of the sympathy and the general feeling about Afghanistan these days, people seem to think it has a good chance of being put on the list. But the reason the nine others never got on the list was because the government of Afghanistan could not fulfill the requirements for their protection."

"I never want to present the disability rights movement as a movement that was free of racism or sexism or homophobia, or even ageism or ableism. The movement has really struggled, but I think like all social change, groups and waves discovered that all of this stuff is highly intersectional, and the more people we can include and the more broadly we can make these analysis of power, the more effective we can be."

"[being a historian of disability is] interesting and exciting, but it’s also an amazing analytical tool. To me, it’s the best way to bring together questions about race, class, gender, sexuality, all together into, into the same conversation."

"I think this is one way in which we see disability operating as a concept really forcefully in U.S. history where slave owners and those embracing racism could categorize an entire group of people as disabled inherently in body and mind, which they did regarding Africans and African Americans, and thus justify slavery. They combined ableism and racism to do that really inseparably, and said these human beings are inferior, they’re, they’re inherently deficient, inherently disabled of body and mind, and thus need slavery...and I think that’s one of the real ironies here, right, is that slave owners and slave traders valued very highly the physical abilities and reproductive abilities of enslaved peoples, and obviously enslaved peoples produced economically and were, and they were forced to produce economically, and their labor was valued, and yet they were defined in racist and ablest terms as unable to contribute and needing slavery."

"abolitionists often talked about the way that slavery was disabling both of body and mind, and thus used that argument to argue against slavery, and saying that African Americans needed to be rescued from slavery. So, you know, both the pros and cons of slavery are the people who were argued against and the people who argued for it used disability to talk about slavery."

"we see today how caretakers are some of the poorest paid people in society, and at this point they’re who we’re all relying on right here for caretaking"

"As an author I'm careful about the words that I use. Words matter. For example, characterizing someone as "wheelchair bound" or "confined to a wheelchair" is profoundly different than characterizing them as a "wheelchair user" or "wheelchair rider." The differentiation is not political correctness: it is an entirely different ideological and intellectual framework of comprehension. The contemporary disability-rights movement has understood that redefining and reclaiming language is central to self-direction, just as it has been for feminist; lesbian, gay, queer, and transgender; and racial freedom movements."

"All of us go in and out of the category of disabled throughout our lives, some of us more permanently, others of us not, but, this is the story of what it simply means to be human."

"I think the difficulty that has come with that is that today we understand disability as almost exclusively a medical situation, and thus stress cure, and when cure doesn’t happen, folks are considered failures, and folks with disabilities tend to be only understood in this very medical framework, and that, you know, the reality that folks with disabilities have lives far outside of, you know, their medical diagnoses is often ignored. The medical diagnoses are often considered to be permanent, and that diagnosis has come to have great power, particularly with stigmatized diagnoses, of devaluing people economically, socially, and people...have become simply less integrated into the communities after diagnosis...under the medical model, there’s nothing to be learned or gained from disability, and I would argue instead that human variability is really quite immense and can be a great blessing, and it’s something we rely on as a society, but when we categorize people with disabilities, you know, as inherently deficient and in need of cure, always in need of change and never good enough, that really does folks a disservice and it damages all of us."

"I've learned that disability pushes us to examine ourselves and the difficult questions about the American past. Which peoples and which bodies have been considered fit and appropriate for public life and active citizenship? How have people with disabilities forged their own lives, their own communities, and shaped the United States? How has disability affected law, policy, economics, play, national identity, and daily life? The answers to these questions reveal a tremendous amount about us as a nation."

"Although people with disabilities share social stigmatization, and sometimes are brought together by common experiences and common goals, their lives and interests have varied widely according to race, class, sexuality, gender, age, ideology, region, and type of disability-physical, cognitive, sensory, and/or psychological."

"...disability is often elusive and changing. Not only do people with disabilities have a history, but the concept of disability has a history as well."

"This book will make clear that people with disabilities have lived and continue to live with disproportionately higher rates of poverty because of specific social structures, ideologies, and practices that hinder their social advancement."

"Human variability is immense. We see and hear in varying degrees, our limbs are of different lengths and strengths, our minds process information differently, we communicate using different methods and speeds, we move from place to place via diverse methods, and our eye colors are not the same. Some of us can soothe children, some have spiritual insight, and some discern the emotions of others with astounding skill. Which bodily and mental variabilities are considered inconsequential, which are charming, and which are stigmatized, changes over time-and that is the history of disability."

"I think at the core of capitalism is the valuing of some kinds of labor more than others. That’s simply at the core, and then taking that further of some bodies who do certain kinds of labor more than others..."

"I think the big irony is that industrial labor was really disabling, whether that was coal mines or shoemaking or farm work, industrial farm work. Those are really hard on bodies and often on minds, and it was very disabling. So even while it excluded disability at the beginning, it created a lot of disability."

"In August 1945 British military intelligence unwittingly performed a splendid experiment in the social psychology of natural scientists. They delivered the news of Hiroshima to interned German atomic scientists, and secretly recorded the conversation that resulted. Only fragments of the record have got past restrictions on “classified” material, but they are enough to reveal the German scientists’ mentality—their soul, if I may use an outmoded term. They were conscience-stricken; they had failed “German science.” Casting about for reasons, they took note of the obvious disparity in size: the American A-bomb project had been enormously larger than their own. But that contrast only deepened the anguish of self-accusation. “We would not have had the moral courage,” Werner Heisenberg, the originator of the Uncertainty Principle, exclaimed, “to recommend to the government in the spring of 1942 that they should employ 120,000 people.” ... Implicit in that soul-searching was one measure of the scientist’s social and moral worth: his capacity to beat the competition, to win, whether fame for himself or wars for his country, or both together. When Heisenberg emerged from internment and discovered that the winners were uneasy, he turned to a different measure of the scientist’s worth. He and his colleagues had shown moral courage, he decided, of a higher order. They had dragged their feet, to withhold the A-bomb from their Nazi masters. ..."

"... Natural science is not occult but accessible to any normal mind, and it generates real, not imaginary power—which confronts us as an alien force, which may even destroy us all. Nuclear bombs are the appropriate symbol, not only in their literal capacity to destroy us all, but also in the universal irresponsibility that they embody. Scientific inventors created them as an unrestricted gift to military and political leaders, who keep insisting in advance that “the adversary” will be responsible if “we” are “obliged” to initiate some “nuclear exchange.”"

"The history of medicine serves several useful functions today, when doctors and the American health care system confront many challenges. Physicians live and work in an era of escalating expectations, eroding autonomy, and decreasing discretionary time. There is so much—far too much—to know, to learn, and to do. Understandably, many doctors are concerned about the future of medicine as they watch so many powerful political, economic, and social forces transform medical practice, research, and education. In this context, the history of medicine provides useful perspective and teaches valuable lessons. Just as a helps us assess the significance of their symptoms and develop a diagnostic and therapeutic strategy, the history of medicine provides important perspective on present and future challenges and opportunities. ... History also teaches humility. I could cite many examples that apply to institutions, organizations, nations, and entire cultures, but I will focus on humility at the level of the individual. The aphorism “fame is fleeting” applies to medicine, as it does to any other area of human endeavor. Almost all of the most influential physicians and medical scientists of earlier generations are now forgotten. ..."

"is an impatient industry, especially when Wall Street is involved. Healthcare professionals must be sure that aggressive strategies to cut costs and enhance short-term profits do not harm patients. We face special challenges when new policies are implemented abruptly. For example, a managed care company in Wisconsin gave hospitals less than 2 months’ notice in 1994 that they would routinely authorize just 5 days of hospitalization for patients undergoing CABG despite the fact that fewer than 9% of patients in the state were achieving this target at the time."

"Why is a book that weaves together histories of heart care, a celebrated medical center, and specialization important? And why should it interest general readers as well as health care professionals, historians, social scientists, and policymakers? First of all, most individuals living in industrial countries have or will develop cardiovascular disease during their lifetimes. And most of them have already seen coronary heart disease alter or end the lives of family members and friends. Despite astonishing developments in diagnosis and treatment in recent decades, cardiovascular disease still kills more Americans than any other cause. Its economic implications are staggering. In the United States alone, medical costs and productivity losses related to cardiovascular disease are approaching $500 billion annually. ... Second, the Mayo Clinic is the world's oldest and largest multispeciality group practice. There is value in understanding why this institution has been a national leader in health care since the early twentieth century. ... Specialization is the book's third major topic. I agree with historian 's assertion that "specialization is the fundamental theme for the organization of medicine in the twentieth century." ..."

"The question that poses itself is exactly what one means by “democracy.” Is it to be identified with self-conscious peoples ruling themselves, or does it entail the establishment and maintenance of “civic culture” by experts with “progressive” social views? Although these two opposed understandings have coexisted in the same societies, they are fundamentally incompatible."