[History] hath triumphed over time, which besides it nothing but eternity hath triumphed over.
The 1610s
13 quotations.
Whosoever, in writing a modern history, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may happily strike out his teeth.
Do those concerns about cancel culture and McCarthyism and censorship only apply to the left or do they apply to the POTUS threatening to investigate schools for teaching American journalism? Silence is deafening here.
While history is what happened, it is also, just as important, how we think about what happened and what we unearth and choose to remember about what happened
White Americans desire to be free of a past they do not want to remember, while Black Americans remain bound to a past they can never forget.
Reparations amount to a societal obligation in a nation where our Constitution sanctioned slavery, Congress passed laws protecting it, and our federal government initiated, condoned, and practiced legal racial segregation and discrimination against Black Americans until half a century ago. And so it is the federal government that would pay [reparations].
If we are truly a great nation, the truth cannot destroy us.
The racism we are fighting today was originally conjured to justify working unfree Black people, often until death, to generate extravagant riches for ... all the ancillary white people ... who earned their living and built their wealth from that free Black labor.
The hundred-year period of racial apartheid and racial terrorism known as Jim Crow.
To this day, the only Americans who have ever received government restitution for slavery were white enslavers in Washington, D.C., whom the federal government compensated after the Civil War for their loss of human property.
We cannot make up for all the lives lost and dreams snatched, for all the suffering endured. But we can atone for it. We can acknowledge the crime. And we can do something to try to set things right, to ease the hardship and hurt of so many of our fellow Americans.
None of us can be held responsible for the wrongs of our ancestors. But if today we choose not to do the right and necessary thing, that burden we own.
School curricula generally treat slavery as an aberration in a free society, and textbooks largely ignore the way that many prominent men, women, industries, and institutions profited from and protected slavery.