Historians From The United States

"Putin now believes it is time to concentrate on strengthening Russia internally. In his annual “Message to the Federal Assembly” (the Russian equivalent of a State of the Union Message) in December 2012, Putin barely mentioned the outside world. The international system, he suggested, is fraught with risk for Russia, not opportunity. Russians, Putin commanded, need to turn inward. They should look to patriotism, not Westernism; to solidarity, not individualism; to spirituality, not consumerism and moral decay."

"Putin firmly opposes U.S. policy toward Syria and the threat of force against Iran. But his opposition stems neither from anti-Americanism nor a desire to back the Iranian mullahs or Syria’s Bashar al-Assad in their struggles with the West. It is rooted in his obsession with stability. Helping Tehran secure a nuclear weapon and keeping Assad in Damascus are not Putin’s goals. But an Israeli or U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear sites, and NATO or the United Nations intervening in Syria to forcibly remove Assad, would increase global volatility."

"When you look at Russia today, you have to try to imagine to yourself "What would a country look like if it was run by a former KGB agent?" — and I think what we're seeing today, with all kinds of clandestine activity, all kinds of mysterious men … taking over Crimea, the peninsula attached to Ukraine, and affecting the situation on the ground so that later Russia can annex it — and then the kind of speeches that we've heard coming out of President Vladimir Putin about the justification of Russia's takeover or Crimea, going back into the long history of grievances against the west, dating back to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and even going back many centuries before, really, a long perspective on Russian history, this is the kind of thing you would have imagined from someone who has seen themself as a servant of the state, and as someone from an institution that sees themselves as the defender of that state. The KGB used to think of itself as the sword and the shield of the system of the state, the Soviet State — and then the Russian state after it collapsed. That is the emblem of the KGB."

"Our problem is that we do not fully understand Putin’s calculus, just as he does not understand ours. In Putin’s view, the United States, the European Union and NATO have launched an economic and proxy war in Ukraine to weaken Russia and push it into a corner. As Valery Gerasimov, chief of staff of the Russian armed forces, has underscored, this is a hybrid, 21st-century conflict, in which financial sanctions, support for oppositional political movements and propaganda have all been transformed from diplomatic tools to instruments of war. Putin likely believes that any concession or compromise he makes will encourage the West to push further."

"Putin was personally angered by events in Libya and the death of President Mammar Qaddafi at the hands of rebels as Qaddafi tried to flee Tripoli after NATO’s intervention in the civil war there. In Putin’s view (again expressed openly in his public addresses and in interviews), the United States was now responsible for a long sequence of revolutions close to Russia’s borders and in countries with close ties to Moscow."

"I appreciate the importance of the Congress’s impeachment inquiry. I am appearing today as a fact witness, as I did during my deposition on October 14th, in order to answer your questions about what I saw, what I did, what I knew, and what I know with regard to the subjects of your inquiry. I believe that those who have information that the Congress deems relevant have a legal and moral obligation to provide it. I take great pride in the fact that I am a nonpartisan foreign policy expert, who has served under three different Republican and Democratic presidents. I have no interest in advancing the outcome of your inquiry in any particular direction, except toward the truth."

"I had long contemplated the failure of the Negro to strike one solitary blow for his own freedom during the War of the Rebellion, when he might easily, by an uprising, have plunged the South into chaotic impotency, thereby compelling the return of Southern soldiers to defend their hearthstones. Many Northerners desired just such an event. But the Southern Negro not only did not rise in vindictiveness but even toiled in the field, worked in factories and mines, and built fortifications for his masters. ... In other words, the Negro forged and repaired the chains for his own bondage when he should have, by revolting, ignited a monster conflagration in the rear of the Confederacy, which would have consumed it much earlier than it was."

"Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is a fiercely honest, unwavering, and unprecedented statement, one that has never been attempted by any other historian or intellectual... It is truly an Indigenous peoples' voice that gives Dunbar-Ortiz's book direction, purpose, and trustworthy intention."

"Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States should be essential reading in schools and colleges...A sobering look at a grave history."

"Every society has an origin narrative that explains that society to itself and the world with a set of stories and symbols. The origin myth, as scholar-activist Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz has termed it, defines how a society understands its place in the world and its history. The myth provides the basis for a nation's self-defined identity. Most origin narratives can be called myths because they usually present only the most flattering view of a nation's history; they are not distinguished by honesty. Ours begins with Columbus "discovering" a hemisphere where some 80 million people already lived but didn't really count"

"In her acclaimed 2014 book An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz renarrates the dominant story of American history, foregrounding the settler colonial practices that disrupted North American Indigenous ways of living, particularly their connection to land and water."

"This may well be the most important US history book you will read in your lifetime...Spoiler alert: the colonial era is still here, and so are the Indians."

"Visual art is very freeing, because it answers only to the eye."

"Dunbar was extremely charismatic. "It was meeting her that turned me into a feminist instantly, Linda Gordon recalled."

"(What’s the last great book you read?) The one I’m reading now; “Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment,” by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a history of how the United States evolved to where we are as a nation besieged by gun violence. This is not the kind of book I’d usually read, but I loved her earlier book, “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States”; reading it was like going back to school and gaining a new perspective of the Americas, one that retrieved the lost history of my ancestors."

"I think the best place to start in developing solidarity with indigenous and other land struggles is the work being done at the international level, mostly in the United Nations system."

"This was a new definition. I think there's room in our culture for interesting people who are black and for interesting people who are female and interesting people who are black and female. There's hardly any room to be interesting if you're old."

"U.S. activists are always enthusiastic about and do solidarity work for agrarian uprisings in Latin America, such as the Zapatistas and the previous national liberation movements that had agrarian reform/revolution as their bases. But, they have not taken the time and made the commitment to understand indigenous and other agrarian struggles in the United States. Even the Civil Rights Movement in the South was weakened by not taking up the issue of land, and when voting rights were achieved organizers fled north and west to work in urban areas."

""Settler colonialism is inherently genocidal in terms of the genocide convention," writes historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Although the genocide convention is not retroactive (it only became applicable in the United States in 1988, the year the US Senate ratified it), it is a useful lens for studying Indigenous history."

"It hasn't come together finally. There's no end to this, and it changes over time. My relationship with history as I used to write it, and as I sometimes use it in my work — that was something that took several years, actually, for me to feel comfortable with. And as I continued to wrestle with it and to deal with it visually, it's that I can do whatever I want to the figure; I can do whatever I want with history…"

"I think that’s the kind of relationship between recognition and black women. That you have to be an optimist to think something’s going to work out and just keep trying because if you concentrate on the really awful actual facts of life, then you’ll just crawl into bed and pull the covers over your head."

"Our search for understanding in matters of race automatically inclines us toward blackness."

"The whole point of defining races is mostly to put people down, and so those needs change over time."

"We need to recognize the destructive role played by the media in fanning the flames of the "Black-Jewish Conflict." Cornel West, bell hooks, Richard Green, Barbara Christian, Henry Louis Gates, Marian Wright Edelman, Nell Painter, Albert Raby....Why are these names not as well known outside the African American community as the names of Louis Farrakhan or Leonard Jeffries? Are they, in their diversity and dynamism, less representative of the African American community?"

"We discover through genetics or the genome or through culture, through migration and so forth, anthropology that racist dont exist, biologically, that you can't box people up in little boxes according to race."

"What has changed in the 21st century is that what we think of as class privilege can go a long way in blunting the color phobia"

"Just because you say that things in the 21 century are not the same as they were in the 20th century, doesnt mean that you're saying that we're in a post-racial society. We are not in a post-racial society, but things are not like they were in the age of segregation or slavery."

"The idea of beauty being white, that is another enlightenment idea, actually, an 18th-century idea by another German, named Winckelmann, who's the father of art history"

"I live in Newark, which was heavily - actually bulldozed in the 1960s in urban renewal. And we think of urban renewal as harming black people, which of course it did, but it also hit some other vulnerable people, and Italian-American neighborhoods also got it."

"Before desegregation, before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, all those laws, exclusionary laws, were meant to keep Negroes out."

"The census keeps counting us by race for purposes of undoing racial harm in the past."

"We still have slavery in the world today. and two of the areas pinpointed for slavery are Latin America, notably Brazil, and Eastern Asia."

"U.S. leftists do not want to really acknowledge that they live within not only an imperialist state, but also one founded on being a colonizing state. Actually, indigenous land struggles had never stopped in the United States; social activists and leftists had little interest in Indians, and their struggles were simply not publicized, but beginning in the late 1950s they became more frequent and more widespread and began to be noticed, leading up to the Wounded Knee uprising in 1973."

"The US polity has been trying to rid itself of Indigenous nations since first settlement. Four hundred years later, multiculturalism is the mechanism for avoiding acknowledgment of settler colonialism."

"The United States has never been "a nation of immigrants." It has always been a settler state with a core of descendants from the original colonial settlers, that is, primarily Anglo-Saxons, Scots Irish, and German. The vortex of settler colonialism sucked immigrants through a kind of seasoning process of Americanization, not as rigid and organized as the "seasoning" of Africans, which rendered them into human commodities, but effective nevertheless."

"This idea of the gift-giving Indian helping to establish and enrich the development of the United States is a screen that obscures the fact that the very existence of the country is a result of the looting of an entire continent and its resources, reducing the Indigenous population, and forcibly relocating and incarcerating them in reservations. The fundamental unresolved issues of Indigenous lands, treaties, and sovereignty could not but scuttle the premises of multiculturalism for Native Americans."

""A nation of immigrants" was a mid-twentieth-century revisionist origin story."

"White supremacy and settler-colonial violence are permanently embedded in US topography. The United States has a foundational problem of white nationalism that wasn't new with Nixon or Reagan or Trump."

"A revolutionary working class must be able to acknowledge its enemy and eschew not only capitalism but also colonialism and imperialism."

"Five hundred years later, Native peoples are still fighting to protect their lands and their rights to exist as distinct political communities and individuals. Most US citizens' knowledge about Indians is inaccurate, distorted, or limited to elementary-school textbooks, cheesy old spaghetti westerns, or more contemporary films like Dances with Wolves or The Last of the Mohicans. Few can name more than a handful of Native nations out of the over five hundred that still exist or can tell you who Leonard Peltier is. Mention Indian gaming and they will have strong opinions about it one way or another. Some might even have an Indian casino in their community, but they will probably be curiously incurious if you ask them how Indian gaming came to be or about the history of the nation that owns the casino. In many parts of the country it's not uncommon for non-Native people to have never met a Native person or to assume that there are no Indians who live among them. On the other hand, in places where there is a concentration of Natives, like in reservation border towns, what non-Native people think they know about Indians is typically limited to racist tropes about drunk or lazy Indians. They are seen as people who are maladjusted to the modern world and cannot free themselves from their tragic past."

"Lack of imagination also indicates lack of commitment for figuring it out."

"The United States will not decolonize until it is forced to do so. And unless colonization and imperialism are understood to be inherent in the very founding and all US institutions, we cannot begin to dismantle the fiscal-military state."

""Colonization," "dispossession," "settler colonialism," "genocide"-these are the terms that drill to the core of US history, to the very source of the country's existence. (Author's Note)"

"Surviving genocide, by whatever means, is resistance: non-Indians must know this in order to more accurately understand the history of the United States. (Author's Note)"

"This book attempts to tell the story of the United States as a colonialist settler-state, one that, like colonialist European states, crushed and subjugated the original civilizations in the territories it now rules. Indigenous peoples, now in a colonial relationship with the United States, inhabited and thrived for millennia before they were displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated."

"My hope is that this book will be a springboard to dialogue about history, the present reality of Indigenous peoples' experience, and the meaning and future of the United States itself. (Author's Note)"

"I think Marxism is a hard sell in the Native movement and for African Americans but less so for Mexican Americans because of their political genealogies. Today it’s even difficult for Chicanos, as well as Native Americans, because Marxism is deemed just Western epistemology or a Western worldview. There is of course a lot of Eurocentrism in Marx’s early writings. There is the idea of progress, but people don’t look at his later work enough, when he was getting into ethnology…"

"I never thought I would see it, you know, in the 1960s or '70s. It didn't seem like there would ever be any questioning of the role of Columbus. But it will be a long struggle still. It’s just not appropriate to celebrate Columbus and Indigenous peoples on the same day. It’s a contradiction. One is a genocidal enslavement, is what Columbus represents. And the situation of Native people today, still under colonialism, with shrunken land bases and not true sovereignty, is the fruit of that beginning, and they’re completely contradictory. (2021)"

"The left blames white nationalism. The right blames mental illness. Neither explains that it happens often here and nowhere else. But mass shootings account for a very small number of gun deaths: Many more women are killed in their home by guns. Men used to just knock women around, but rarely did death result. But with a gun on hand, there's a death. Half of the gun deaths are suicide. The proliferation of guns is a huge problem, but its cause is not lack of regulations. There were lots of regulations in the '70s when this started; going postal and school shootings started in the '70s."

"It was Berkeley that first recognized Indigenous Peoples’ Day in 1992 during the quincentennial. San Francisco came, I think, about five or six years later. But Berkeley — you know, things start in Berkeley. People think they’re crazy there, and then suddenly it’s everywhere. (2021)"