It seemed a fitting way to end my teaching career. I had always insisted that a good education was a synthesis of book learning and involvement in social action, that each enriched the other.
In the year 1877, the signals were given for the rest of the century: the black would be put back; the strikes of white workers would not be tolerated; the industrial and political elites of North and...
In Maryland, for instance, by the new constitution of 1776, to run for governor one had to own 5,000 pounds of property; to run for state senator, 1,000 pounds. Thus, 90 percent of the population were...
I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would reflect...
History is the memory of states,' wrote Henry Kissinger in his first book, , in which he proceeded to tell the history of nineteenth-century Europe from the viewpoint of the leaders of Austria and Eng...
During elections for the 1776 convention to frame a constitution for Pennsylvania, a Privates Committee urged voters to oppose great and overgrown rich men . . . they will be too apt to be framing dis...
Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law. It requires that a population dangerously concentrated in cities and factories, whose lives are filled with cause for rebellion, be tau...
Columbus was one of the great heroes of world history, to be admired for his daring feat of imagination and courage. In my account, I acknowledged that he was an intrepid sailor, but also pointed out...
Catholic Church, expelled all the Jews,
But I suppose the most revolutionary act one can engage in is... to tell the truth.
At Lowell, a Female Labor Reform Association put out a series of Factory Tracts. The first was entitled Factory Life as It Is By an Operative and spoke of the textile mill women as nothing more nor le...
And one woman wrote, in 1850, in the book Greenwood Leaves: True feminine genius is ever timid, doubtful, and clingingly dependent; a perpetual childhood. Another book, Recollections of a Southern Mat...
Against the claims of a violent human nature there is enormous historical evidence that people, when free of a manufactured nationalist or religious hysteria, are more inclined to be compassionate tha...
African slavery lacked two elements that made American slavery the most cruel form of slavery in history: the frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalistic agriculture; the reduction of the...
A black man, Benjamin Banneker, who taught himself mathematics and astronomy, predicted accurately a solar eclipse, and was appointed to plan the new city of Washington, wrote to Thomas Jefferson: I s...
[T]hat combination of inferior status and derogatory thought [is what] we call racism.
If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if...
More militant. Frederick Douglass spoke in 1857: Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reforms. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her augu...
In the industrial towns children went to work with their fathers and mothers, schools and doctors were only promises, a bed of one’s own was a rare luxury.
Him. The government of the United States, he said, was willing to send armed forces halfway around the world for a cause which was incomprehensible, but it was unwilling to send marshals into Mississi...