Historians From The United States

"Perhaps Meridel Le Sueur's wisest and most comforting words to women of the world are found in a line of a poem of solidarity she composed for the North Vietnamese Women's Union: "It was the bumble bee and the butterfly who survived, not the dinosaur,""

"Some of the best poetry is being written by three American Indian women"

"Meridel has enjoyed being "rediscovered" by the feminist press, particularly because of her chance to work with women editors. Her male editors typically had "such a superior attitude-even in punctuation." Whereas, she contrasts, "The Feminist Press wouldn't even change a comma without asking." The format of Ripening, with its biography, commentary and scrapbook photos, "would never have been conceived in male printing," she notes. Trashing the women writers has resulted in the neglect of twenty midwest women writers-"some as good as Sandburg or Lewis"-now out of print, Meridel says unhappily. She cites as an example her friend and Wisconsin author Zona Gale, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1921 ("for a feminist story"), yet is virtually forgotten and unread today. Meridel "repudiates categories of male literature." She politely answered all questions about times and dates, but mildly remarked, "Linear thinking is patriarchal.""

"The whole temper of the world is in a much higher consciousness than I've even seen it-there's a global consciousness. I think we're on the verge of a new humanity if we don't blow it up!"

"Emma Goldman lived at the Anarchist's House too. Describe Emma Goldman? Her interest to Meridel was as "the first sexually 'free' woman" she met. "The women and feminists of that period never dealt with sex. They were Puritans.""

"For the first time, Meridel says "I am writing what I want to write. I don't know if anyone is going to read it," she adds with the pragmatism of someone whose work was virtually banned for years. "I don't even think about it. I just love it. It's a wonderful gift to have a passion like that.""

"It's really hard to describe how you can fill a city with terror. When you look at it chronologically, it's terrifying to see how close you are to fascism."

"Her advice to the women's movement is to avoid male prototypes: "It has to be a collective vision. The time is over entirely for private vision, or private greed. We're entering a new era of the same fate for all.""

"Meridel Le Sueur, whose work I cite and discuss, has been an inspiration to generations of women writers. Having known her since I was a child, it is with a special gratitude that I thank her both personally and professionally for her labors."

"The independent strong woman was a bad woman, even in the radical press. Irene and I had a vision of the free new woman growing in her own pattern-a new crop, new protein, new communication, new connections, new conceptions-birthing out of terrible hunger and anger."

"The great energies, languages and nourishment of women are seized, hidden and violated by indifference and outright conspiracy in order to maintain the silence of women. It is a loss when the voices of women are muffled, lost or deliberately silenced."

"The women's movement is great in the Twin Cities, I think."

"I'd always identified myself with the people's struggles. I think I began writing more about it and having an audience for writing it. But we wrote as partisans, we call it. You're on the side and like I was marching. I don't say anything about the troubles of the manufacturers association, or any sympathy for them. I just identified with the strikers."

"Could the title of the Gospel of Thomas—named after the disciple who, tradition tells us, went to India—suggest the influence of Indian tradition?"

"Yet the gnostic Gospel of Thomas relates that as soon as Thomas recognizes him, Jesus says to Thomas that they have both received their being from the same source . . . Does not such teaching—the identity of the divine and human, the concern with illusion and enlightenment, the founder who is presented not as Lord, but as spiritual guide—sound more Eastern than Western? Some scholars have suggested that if the names were changed, the 'living Buddha' appropriately could say what the Gospel of Thomas attributes to the living Jesus. Could Hindu or Buddhist tradition have influenced gnosticism?"

"...she is enormously strong. Pagels not only survived two tragedies in the space of fifteen months but since then has written another book, reared her children, taught her many students. She is, by all reports, a good colleague, a devoted friend. Her mind is quick and generous. At fifty-two, she has a mild, earnest appearance (a rounded, friendly face, windblown blond hair), and yet in conversation she is absolutely fierce, focussed, picking apart the careless question, delighted by the unexpected one. When she delivers her lectures for an undergraduate course on the New Testament—Monday and Wednesday mornings at ten—she does not so much pace the room as prowl it. Pagels radiates so much intensity that you somehow imagine a fast-burning cigarette in her hand. There is none. She does not smoke. She smolders."

"Satan is a way of perceiving opponents. You may not believe the mythology of such a universe, but it’s in you, a background perception.”"

"There are certain ecological structures in any marriage—some with a traditional gender bias and some not. Simply, people take on certain roles. In a way, I had to do everything. But, most of all, I also wanted to take on the challenge of not giving up, of not despairing. Because Heinz was on the side of life. He loved life. He was full of explorative excitement, interest, passion. I realized that it would be no honor to him to say, ‘I can’t take this, I can’t go on, it’s too hard.’ Somehow, I wanted to take on something of what I’d learned from him, the way he embraced life, with all its dangers and difficulties. I was challenged to do that. I can’t say I’ve done it, but that’s what I wanted to do."

"At one point in my life, I had to make a decision...I had to decide whether to have too little or too much in my life...Study, children, friends, travel—all of it. That was an easy one. I chose too much.”"

"The Myth of the Frontier is our oldest and most characteristic myth, expressed in a body of literature, folklore, ritual, historiography, and polemics produced over a period of three centuries. According to this mythic-historiography, the conquest of the wilderness and the subjugation or displacement of the Native Americans who originally inhabited it have been the means to our achievement of a national identity, a democratic polity, an ever-expanding economy, and a phenomenally dynamic and ‘progressive’ civilization.1"

"A crucial embellishment of the origin myth and key element of the national identity has been the myth of the frontier, analyzed in Richard Slotkin's Gunfighter Nation (1992), the last volume of a fascinating trilogy."

"Men go and come, but earth abides."

"It was all tied up in that same old question. How much did man strike outward to affect all his surroundings and how much did the surroundings press in upon him? Did the Napoleonic Age produce Napoleon or did he produce it?"

"In any basic struggle for power, the intellectual man went under."

"What you were preparing against—that never happened! All the best-laid plans could not prevent the disaster against which no plans had been laid."

"What would be the use of all these books now? Why worry about one of them? Why worry about all the millions of them? There was no one left, now, to carry on. Books themselves, mere wood pulp and lampblack, were nothing—without a mind to use them."

"If there is a God who made us and we did wrong before His eyes—as George says—at least we did wrong only because we were as God made us, and I do not think that He should set traps. Oh, you should know better than George! Let us not bring all that back into the world again—the angry God, the mean God—the one who does not tell us the rules of the game, and then strikes us when we break them. Let us not bring Him back!"

"The boundaries, like defenses, drew lines that were hard and uncompromising. They, too, were man-made, abstractions dominating reality. When you crossed by the highway, on a line, the road surface changed. It was smooth in Delaware, but when you went into Maryland, you felt a change in vibration, and all at once the tires hummed differently. “State line,” the sign read. “Entering Nebraska. Speed limit 60 m.p.h.” So even right and wrong altered with the sharp snap of a discontinuity, and you stepped harder on the throttle. At the national boundary the flags showed different colors, though the same breeze blew them. You stopped for customs and immigration, and were suddenly a stranger, unfamiliar. “Look,” you said, “that policeman has a different uniform!” You got new money, and even for picture postcards the stamps had to have another face on them. “Better drive extra carefully,” you said. “Wouldn’t be good to get arrested over here.” That was a funny business! You stepped across a line you couldn’t see, and then you were one of those queer people—a foreigner! But boundaries fade even faster than fences. Imaginary lines need no rust to efface them."

"What a strange thing then is this great civilization, that no sooner have men attained it than they seek to flee from it!"

"But, granting the numbers, the family group was just what it might have been at any time in almost any society—father, mother, and children, tightly grouped to form the basic social unit, so basic in fact that it might be considered biological rather than social. After all, he thought, the family was the toughest of all human institutions. It had preceded civilization, and so it naturally survived afterward."

"Man invented civilization, and was inordinately proud of it. But in no way did civilization change life more than by sharpening the line between work and play, and at last that division came to be more important than the old one between sleeping and waking. Sleep came to be thought a kind of relaxation, and “sleeping on the job” a heinous sin. The turning out of the light and the ringing of the alarm clock were not so much the symbols of man’s dual life as were the punching of the time clock and the blowing of the whistle. Men marched on picket lines and threw bricks and exploded dynamite to shift an hour from one classification to the other, and other men fought equally hard to prevent them. And always work became more laborious and odious, and play grew more artificial and febrile."

"Perhaps rationalism—like so much else—had only been one of the luxuries which men could afford under civilization."

"In the times of civilization men had really felt themselves as the masters of creation. Everything has been good or bad in relation to man. So you killed rattlesnakes. But now nature had become so overwhelming that any attempt at its control was merely outside anyone’s circle of thought. You lived as part of it, not as its dominating power."

"How then, once overthrown, shall this great civilization, except by renewed Forces and Pressures, ever come again?"

"Firearms were as likely to create as to solve difficulties."

"To think of that as something bad was merely to think in terms of what had once been and no longer existed."

"“There are no atheists in foxholes,” he remembered, but the whole world now was nothing but a huge foxhole! But certainly what had happened did not inspire one to think that God was particularly interested in the human race, or in its individuals."

"There had been many definitions of Man; he would make another: “The noise-producing animal.”"

"Yes, he realized, if a man began to think of himself as divinely appointed, he was close to thinking of himself as God—and at that point lay insanity."

"“Oh, don’t worry,” he thought, putting it into words, “there never had been perfection yet, and it certainly isn’t going to start now for me.”"

"Suddenly he felt that all civilization depended not only upon men but also upon these other things which had marched with him like kinsman and friends and companions. If Saint Francis had hailed the sun as brother, might not we also say, “Oh, Brother Wheat! Oh, Sister Barley!” He smiled to himself. Yes, one could go on: “Oh, Grandfather Wheel! Oh, Cousin Compass! Oh, Friend Binomial Theorem!”"

"People certainly tended to overestimate the intelligence of dogs!"

"A dead cat, it seemed, lay on the counter, but as he looked, it stirred to life and he realized that it had merely been lying, after the the habit of cats, in such a position that it looked dead. The cat looked at him with a kind of cold effrontery, as the duchess at the chambermaid. Ish felt uncomfortable, and had to remind himself that this was the way cats had always behaved."

"“It has never happened!” cannot be construed to mean, “It can never happen!”—as well say, “Because I have never broken my leg, my leg is unbreakable,” or “Because I’ve never died, I am immortal.”"

"He had kept the university library as a reserve for the future. He had even taught the children to respect it. Yes, he had even, he was afraid, put a kind of taboo upon it. In fact, not only here but everywhere, he had always tried to impress the children with an almost mystical value of books. Still he kept the symbol of the burning of the books as one of the worst things that men could do."

"The people who live in any generation do much, he realized, either to create or to solve the problems for the people who come in the generations later."

"Robin Kelley is the preeminent historian of black popular culture writing today."

"Today's mic-hogging, fast-talking, contentious young (and old) lefties continue to hawk little books and pamphlets on revolution, always with choice words or documents from Marx, Mao, even Malcolm. But I've never seen a broadside with "A Black Feminist Statement or even the writings of Angela Davis or June Jordan or Barbara Omolade or Flo Kennedy or Audre Lorde or bell hooks or Michelle Wallace, at least not from the groups who call themselves leftist. These women's collective wisdom has provided the richest insights into American radicalism's most fundamental questions: How can we build a multiracial movement? Who are the working class and what do they desire? How do we resolve the Negro Question and the Woman Question? What is freedom?"

"Radical black feminists have never confined their vision to just the emancipation of black women or women in general, or all black people for that matter. Rather, they are the theorists and proponents of a radical humanism committed to liberating humanity and reconstructing social relations across the board. When bell hooks says "Feminism is for everybody," she is echoing what has always been a basic assumption of black feminists. We are not talking about identity politics but a constantly developing often contested, revolutionary conversation about how all of us might envision and remake the world."

"it doesn’t have to be reciprocity. We don’t build solidarity for the sake of getting something back. We build it because we’re together. And that old slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all,”"