Historians From The United States

"Ever since I was quite young I’ve been fascinated by the idea that something would hit you — not just that you would find something, but that something would find you."

"Politicians are always invoking providence. Politicians are forced in America to behave as the political equivalent of those baseball players who hit home runs and run around, waving their hands up to heaven as if God was actually worrying about whether they were going to hit a home run or not, helping one team rather than the other! It’s a fantastic idea, but it’s somehow part of our popular culture and our politicians pay lip service to the same notion."

"Things change profoundly in the church after Luther. The church becomes much more embattled. It makes some attempts at internal reform. But it also makes very vigorous attempts to silence dissent. With some exceptions — I’m no historian of the Catholic church — but it seems to me that the church has never entirely, as it were, come out from the other side on the Council of Trent. It’s not an accident that the current Pope was the head of the [Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith], the ideological wing of the church [that led the inquisition]."

"Although insecurity, overconfidence, and murderous rage are strange bedfellows, they all coexist in the tyrant’s soul. He has servants and associates, but in effect he is alone. Institutional restraints have all failed. The internal and external censors that keep most ordinary mortals, let alone rulers of nations, from sending irrational messages in the middle of the night or acting on every crazed impulse are absent."

"Tyrannical power is more easily exercised when it appears that the old order continues to exist. The reassuring consensual structures may now be hollowed out and merely decorative, but they are all still in place, so that the bystanders, who crave psychological security and a sense of well-being, can persuade themselves that the rule of law is being upheld."

"It is extremely dangerous to have a state run by someone who governs by impulse."

"Shakespeare did not think that tyrants ever lasted for very long. However cunning they were in their rise, once in power they were surprisingly incompetent. Possessing no vision for the country they ruled, they were incapable of fashioning enduring support, and though they were cruel and violent, they could never crush all of the opposition. Their isolation, suspicion, and anger, often conjoined to an arrogant overconfidence, hastened their downfall. The plays that depict tyranny inevitably end at least with gestures toward the renewal of community and the restoration of legitimate order."

"Shakespeare believed that the tyrants and their minions would ultimately fail, brought down by their own viciousness and by a popular spirit of humanity that could be suppressed but never completely extinguished. The best chance for the recovery of collective decency lay, he thought, in the political action of ordinary citizens. He never lost sight of the people who steadfastly remained silent when they were exhorted to shout their support for the tyrant, or the servant who tried to stop his vicious master from torturing a prisoner, or the hungry citizen who demanded economic justice. "What is the city but the people?""

"The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone. What is needed is to refuse the lies proffered by priests and other fantasymongers and to look squarely and calmly at the true nature of things."

"As with modern totalitarian regimes, people developed techniques for speaking in code, addressing at one or more removes what most mattered to them. But it was not only caution that motivated Shakespeare’s penchant for displacement. He seems to have grasped that he thought more clearly about the issues that preoccupied his world when he confronted them not directly but from an oblique angle. His plays suggest that he could best acknowledge truth—to possess it fully and not perish of it—through the artifice of fiction or through historical distance."

"Populism may look like an embrace of the have-nots, but in reality it is a form of cynical exploitation. The unscrupulous leader has no actual interest in bettering the lot of the poor. Surrounded from birth with great wealth, his tastes run to extravagant luxuries, and he finds nothing remotely appealing in the lives of underclasses. In fact, he despises them, hates the smell of their breath, fears that they carry diseases, and regards them as fickle, stupid, worthless, and expendable. But he sees that they can be made to further his ambitions."

"The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion. The principal enemies of human happiness are inordinate desire—the fantasy of attaining something that exceeds what the finite mortal world allows—and gnawing fear."

"The transformation was not sudden or once-for-all, but it became increasingly possible to turn away from a preoccupation with angels and demons and immaterial causes and to focus instead on things in this world; to understand that humans are made of the same stuff as everything else and are part of the natural order; to conduct experiments without fearing that one is infringing on God’s jealously guarded secrets; to question authorities and challenge received doctrines; to legitimate the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain; to imagine that there are other worlds beside the one that we inhabit; to entertain the thought that the sun is only one star in an infinite universe; to live an ethical life without reference to postmortem rewards and punishments; to contemplate without trembling the death of the soul."

"Poggio Bracciolini was a book hunter, perhaps the greatest in an age obsessed with ferreting out and recovering the heritage of the ancient world. The finding of a lost book does not ordinarily figure as a thrilling event, but behind that one moment was the arrest and imprisonment of a pope, the burning of heretics, and a great culturewide explosion of interest in pagan antiquity. The act of discovery fulfilled the life’s passion of a brilliant book hunter. And that book hunter, without ever intending or realizing it, became a midwife to modernity."

"There was a time in the ancient world—a very long time—in which the central cultural problem must have seemed an inexhaustible outpouring of books. Where to put them all? How to organize them on the groaning shelves? How to hold the profusion of knowledge in one’s head? The loss of this plenitude would have been virtually inconceivable to anyone living in its midst. Then, not all at once but with the cumulative force of a mass extinction, the whole enterprise came to an end. What looked stable turned out to be fragile, and what had seemed for all time was only for the time being."

"Allusions to "hidden counsels" and "mysterious reasons" are almost always the mark of doctrinal incoherence."

"Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity."

"What was ridiculous about Christianity, from the perspective of a cultivated pagan, was not only its language—the crude style of the Gospels’ Greek resting on the barbarous otherness of Hebrew and Aramaic—but also its exaltation of divine humiliation and pain conjoined with an arrogant triumphalism."

"In Gilgamesh the human formed from clay is a wild man, with flowing hair (possibly all over his body) and the strength and manner of life of the animals. In Genesis the clay human is created "in the image of God" and has from the beginning the status of one who is not a companion to the other animals but of one who dominates them."

"A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure—an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as creation—characterizes Montaigne’s restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes’s chronicle of his mad knight, Michelangelo’s depiction of flayed skin, Leonardo’s sketches of whirlpools, Caravaggio’s loving attention to the dirty soles of Christ’s feet."

"The pattern of dreaming and deferral and compromise is an altogether familiar one: it is the epitome of a failed life."

"Everyone understood that Latin learning was inseparable from whipping. One educational theorist of the time speculated that the buttocks were created in order to facilitate the learning of Latin."

"Something happened in the Renaissance, something that surged up against the constraints that centuries had constructed around curiosity, desire, individuality, sustained attention to the material world, the claims of the body. The cultural shift is notoriously difficult to define, and its significance has been fiercely contested. But it can be intuited easily enough when you look in Siena at Duccio’s painting of the enthroned Virgin, the Maestà, and then in Florence at Botticelli’s Primavera."

"On the other side of anger at those who either peddled false visions of security or incited irrational fears of death, Lucretius offered a feeling of liberation and the power to stare down what had once seemed so menacing. What human beings can and should do, he wrote, is to conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and the pleasure of the world."

"I am committed by trade to urging people to attend carefully to the verbal surfaces of what they read."

"Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one’s psychic life."

"He saw in Falstaff...a debauched genius; a fathomlessly cynical, almost irresistible confidence man; a diseased, cowardly, seductive, lovable monster; a father who cannot be trusted."

"The quintessential emblem of religion—and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies at its core—is the sacrifice of a child by a parent."

"This was the crucial moment in the development of the English language, the moment in which the deepest things, the things upon which the fate of the soul depended, were put into ordinary, familiar, everyday words. Two men above all others, William Tyndale and Thomas Cranmer, rose to the task. Without them, without the great English translation of the New Testament and the sonorous, deeply resonant Book of Common Prayer, it is difficult to imagine William Shakespeare."

"It is still not easy for us white southerners to come to grips with our collective blindness to these evils, but it seems to me that we must. So, then, how can we understand our inability, our refusal, to see slavery (and later racial segregation) for what it truly was?"

"I have an exercise that I ask the students in my History of the Old South course to undertake toward the end of the semester. It comes after we have spent weeks studying the institution of slavery and the impact of slavery on the society, the politics, the culture, the economy, and the mind of the antebellum South. I ask them to read two letters, two of the most powerful manuscripts I have come across in my archival searches. Their assignment is to go over these two documents very carefully, line by line, analyze their contents, and answer the following question: "Would antebellum white southerners experience guilt over slavery after reading what is written here? Or did they find ways to look the consequences of slavery in the face on a daily basis and experience no guilt over the South's 'peculiar institution'?" I add that historians have debated this question vigorously for decades and have come down on both sides of the guilt question. Their task- my students' task- is to analyze the two primary documents in light of this question. Again, would antebellum white southerners familiar with the content of these two letters have experienced guilt over what is written here? Or would they have done just the opposite and experienced no guilt over what is described? My final comment to them is that there is no way to answer this question definitively, but we can try to understand white southern attitudes during this era and get some idea of how they saw the world in which they lived."

"In some ways, I did a lot of growing up during my time at Woodberry. Mandatory evening study halls, supervised by masters (as we referred to our teachers), were a major irritant and were absolutely vital to my emergence as a decent student who could aspire to making it into a decent college. We read constantly, even over the summer (I thought I would never make it through O.E. Rølvaag's Giants in the Earth), we memorized (I can still recite long passages of "Thanatopsis"), we took tests and exams (all the time, it seemed to me), we had math and lab science courses that drove me crazy, and we competed on those green, frequently muddy, athletic fields all three seasons of every year (football and winter and spring track for me)."

"It is a sordid tale, all of this, spanning centuries and generations, but we are not doomed by it. We can do better, we have done better, we have done better. But we must do better still. We have to shuck off the last vestiges of the reptilian skin of racism, even if we do not think we are still carrying it around. Because we are. And our failure to shed that skin will continue to poison our politics and shackle the South, and in many ways the rest of the country, with decades of continuing strife and racial injustice. We should strive to be, and we should become, the generation of "grown-ups" who finally, at long last, refuse to put the "hate in children.""

"My ancestors did more than coexist with this institution and draw monetary gain from it. They endorsed it, they embraced it, they celebrated it, they destroyed a hallowed political union to protect it, and they launched what turned out to be the most blood-drenched war in American history to defend it. And with racial segregation, my parents' generation, and my generation, did much the same thing- no secession and civil war this time around, but blood was shed over and over again as the terror of lynching gripped the South in the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. And the Jim Crow laws and institutions built by that turn-of-the-century generation, the generation of "Radical racism," were passed down as immutable folkways and endured into my own generation."

"Charles B. Dew is Ephraim Williams Professor of American History at Williams College and the author of the Fletcher Pratt Award-winning Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secessionist Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (Virginia) and Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge, selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year."

"Pop's sense of right and wrong was much more of a secular than a religious matter. As a boy, he had been a regular attendee at the Presbyterian Church Sunday school, earning medals for not missing a single class, year after year. But as my mother told the story, his experience as a young teenager selling newspapers at the crack of dawn changed his ideas about organized religion. He had seen church fathers returning from late-night visits to the Negro section of town, and he was old enough to know what they had been up to. Their hypocrisy stuck in his craw and solidified into a hostility toward formal religion that lasted the rest of his life."

"Woodberry Forest School is a stunningly beautiful place located in the rolling Virginia Piedmont just outside the small town of Orange. The campus of imposing red brick and white-columned buildings was surrounded by green athletic fields, a working farm, and a nine-hole golf course, with a magnificent visual backdrop of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the western distance. While I was a student there, I roamed the nearby Confederate trenches, leaf-filled but still clearly visible, along the south bank of the Rapidan River, where men from Lee's Army of Northern Virginia had wintered in 1864-1865. The Confederate battle flag that hung in my dorm room during my three years at Woodberry bore witness to my love for the south and a near reverence for the soldiers in grey who manned those trenches on the Rapidan in defense of my native region."

"Where is our historian to give us our side view and our chair of Negro history, to teach our people our own history? We are at the mercy of the "flotsam and jetsam" of the white writers. The very learned Rev. Alexander Crummell, before the American Negro Academy, stated that he heard J. C. Calhoun say that the inferiority of the Negro was so self-evident that he would not believe him human unless he could conjugate Greek verbs; and yet it must have been evident to Calhoun that in North Carolina there were many Negroes held as slaves who could read and write Arabic.¹ In those days men like Juan Latino, Amo, Capitein, Francis Williams, Rev. J. Pennington, and others could not only conjugate the Greek and Hebrew verbs, but had shown unmistakable evidences of learning, for they had received degrees from the universities of world-famed reputation. Yet in those days there were many whites unrestrained, enjoying the opportunities of education, who could not conjugate Greek roots nor verbs of the spoken language of the land. Yet this barrier was set up to persons restrained by force from the enjoyment of the most ordinary rights."

"We have chairs of almost everything, and believe we lack nothing, but we sadly need a chair of Negro history. The white institutions have their chair of history; it is the history of their people, and whenever the Negro is mentioned in the text-books it dwindles down to a footnote. The white scholar's mind and heart are fired because in the temple of learning he is told how on March 5, 1770, the Americans were able to beat the English; but to find Crispus Attucks it is necessary to go deep into special books. In the orations delivered at Bunker's Hill, Daniel Webster never mentioned the Negroes having done anything, and is silent about Peter Salem. In the account of the battle of Long Island City and around New York under Major-General Nathaniel Greene, no mention is made of the eight hundred Negro soldiers who imperiled their lives in the Revolutionary War. Cases can be shown right and left of such palpable omissions."

"We need in the coming dawn the man who will give us the background for our future; it matters not whether he comes from the cloisters of the university or from the rank and file of the fields. The Anglo-Saxon is effusive in his praises to the Saxon shepherds who lived on the banks of the river Elbe, to whom he pays blind allegiance. We need the historian and philosopher to give us with trenchant pen the story of our forefathers and let our soul and body, with phosphorescent light, brighten the chasm that separates us. When the fact has been put down in the scroll of time, that the Negroes of Africa smelted iron and tempered bronzes at the time Europe was wielding stone implements, that the use of letters was introduced among the savages of Europe about 1500 BC and the European carried them to America about the fifteenth century after the Christian era, that Phoenicia and Palestine will live forever in the memory of mankind since America as well as Europe has received letters from the one and religion from the other, we will feel prouder of the achievements of our sires. We must research diligently the annals of time and bring back from obscurity the dormant example of agriculture, industry, and commerce, upon these the arts and sciences and make common the battleground of our heritage."

"The remark attributed to John C. Calhoun,' "that the Negro race was so inferior it could not produce a single individual who could conjugate a Greek verb," was accepted half a century ago in this country as the last word on the subject of the inferiority of the Negro. Thomas Jefferson, one of the fathers of the revolution, and a friend of the Negro race, who was not so dogmatic as Calhoun, said: "I think one (Negro) could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid: and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless and anomalous.... Never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never saw even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture. ... Religion indeed, has produced a Phyllis Wheatley, but it could not produce a poet." So much for the American statesmen."

"The modern school with its many books, but without systematic lectures, turns out many graduates who are lacking in retentiveness and no sooner than the sound of the words has left their teachers' lips, the subject been forgotten; and if they are called upon to explain the theme, it is reduced to an incomprehensible mass of meaningless words."

"Almost keeping pace with the work of scholarship has been the effort to popularize the results, and to place before Negro youth in the schools the true story of race vicissitude, struggle and accomplishment. So that quite largely now the ambition of Negro youth can be nourished on its own milk."

"After this great era of public interest and discussion, it was Alexander Crummell, who, with the reaction already setting in, first organized Negro brains defensively through the founding of the American Negro Academy in 1897 at Washington. A New York boy whose zeal for education had suffered a rude shock when refused admission to the Episcopal Seminary by Bishop Onderdonk, he had been befriended by John Jay and sent to Cambridge University, England, for his education and ordination. On his return, he was beset with the idea of promoting race scholarship, and the Academy was the final result. It has continued ever since to be one of the bulwarks of our intellectual life, though unfortunately its members have had to spend too much of their energy and effort answering detractors and disproving popular fallacies. Only gradually have the men of this group been able to work toward pure scholarship."

"The blatant Caucasian racialist with his theories and assumptions of race superiority and dominance has in turn bred his Ethiopian counterpart-the rash and rabid amateur who has glibly tried to prove half of the world's geniuses to have been Negroes and to trace the pedigree of nineteenth century Americans from the Queen of Sheba. But fortunately to-day there is on both sides of a really common cause less of the sand of controversy and more of the dust of digging."

"The bigotry of civilization which is the taproot of intellectual prejudice begins far back and must be corrected at its source. Fundamentally it has come about from that depreciation of Africa which has sprung up from ignorance of her true rôle and position in human history and the early development of culture. The Negro has been a man without a history because he has been considered a man without a worthy culture."

"In Europe we have had the historian Hume who said in one of his essays that "there are Negro slaves dispersed all over Europe, of whom none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity.... In Jamaica, indeed, they talk of one Negro as a man of parts and learning; but it is likely he is admired for slender accomplishments, like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly.""

"Already the Negro sees himself against a reclaimed background, in a perspective that will give pride and self-respect ample scope, and make history yield for him the same values that the treasured past of any people affords."

"Reinforcing these were still rarer items of Africana and foreign Negro interest, the volumes of Juan Latino,7 the best Latinist of Spain in the reign of Philip V, incumbent of the chair of Poetry at the University of Granada, and author of Poems printed there in 1573 and a book on the Escorials published 1576; the Latin and Dutch treatises of Jacobus Eliza Capitein, a native of West Coast Africa and graduate of the University of Leyden, Gustavus Vassa's celebrated autobiography that supplied so much of the evidence in 1796 for Granville Sharpe's attack on slavery in the British colonies, Julien Raymond's Paris exposé of the disabilities of the free people of color in the then (1791) French colony of Hayti, and Baron de Vastey's Cry of the Fatherland, the famous polemic by the secretary of Christophe that precipitated the Haytian struggle for independence. The cumulative effect of such evidences of scholarship and moral prowess is too weighty to be dismissed as exceptional."

"But weightier surely than any evidence of individual talent and scholarship could ever be, is the evidence of important collaboration and significant pioneer initiative in social service and reform, in the efforts toward race emancipation, colonization and race betterment. From neglected and rust-spotted pages comes testimony to the black men and women who stood shoulder to shoulder in courage and zeal, and often on a parity of intelligence and talent, with their notable white benefactors. There was the already cited work of Vassa that aided so materially the efforts of Granville Sharpe, the record of Paul Cuffee,' the Negro colonization pioneer, associated so importantly with the establishment of Sierra Leone as a British colony for the occupancy of free people of color in West Africa; the dramatic and history-making exposé of John Baptist Phillips,2 African graduate of Edinburgh, who compelled through Lord Bathhurst in 1824 the enforcement of the articles of capitulation guaranteeing freedom to the blacks of Trinidad. There is the record of the pioneer colonization project of Rev. Daniel Coker in conducting a voyage of ninety expatriates to West Africa in 1820, of the missionary efforts of Samuel Crowther in Sierra Leone, first Anglican bishop of his diocese, and that of the work of John Russwurm, a leader in the work and foundation of the American Colonization Society."