The History of the World: 2017

Series links

Here are links to the 12-part series "From Caves to Warehouses: The path of Civilization Through Trade."

Each entry now has a link to the next entry in the series, another link to the previous entry, and a third link back to the main page.

Here are links to the 8-part series on the Battle of Gettysburg.

Each entry now has a link to the next entry in the series, another link to the previous entry, and a third link back to the main page.

Part 1: "Fight Like the Devil"

Part 2: "Them Damned Black Hats Again"

Part 3: "The Most Terrible Struggle of the War"

Part 4: "He Seemed Full of Hope"

Part 5: "My God! Are These All the Troops We Have Here?!?"

Part 6: "My Poor Boys. My Poor Boys."

Part 7: "The Men Lay in Heaps"

Part 8: "The Cleansing"

Quotations about History

"History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life and brings us tidings of antiquity." --Marcus Tullius Cicero

"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it."--Sir Winston Churchill

"History is the short trudge from Adam to atom."--Leonard Louis Levinson

"History never looks like history when you are living through it."--John W. Gardner

"History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives."--Abba Eban

"History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, however, if faced with courage, need not be lived again."--Maya Angelou

"There is no witness so dreadful, no accuser so terrible as the conscience that dwells in the heart of every man."--Polybius

"History is a voice forever sounding across the centuries the laws of right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity."--James A. Froude

"Experience teaches slowly and at the cost of mistakes."--James A. Froude

"History is philosophy teaching by example, and also warning; its two eyes are geography and chronology."--James A. Garfield

"Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity."--Hermann Hesse

"The history of the human race, viewed as a whole may be regarded as the realization of a hidden plan of nature to bring about a political constitution, internally, and for this purpose, also externally perfect, as the only state in which all the capacities implanted by her in mankind can be fully developed."--Immanuel Kant

"From the beginning of our history the country has been afflicted with compromise. It is by compromise that human rights have been abandoned. I insist that this shall cease. The country needs repose after all its trials; it deserves repose. And repose can only be found in everlasting principles."--Charles Sumner

"History teaches that wars begin when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap."--Ronald W. Reagan

"No limit may be set to art, neither is there any craftsman that is fully master of his craft."--The Instruction of Ptahhotep

"History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind."--Edward Gibbon

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."--George Santayana

"Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes."--Voltaire

"One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say."--Will Durant

"For four-fifths of our history, our planet was populated by pond scum."--J. W. Schopf

"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman."--Virginia Woolf

"If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience."--George Bernard Shaw

"We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing."--R. D. Laing

"If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run - and often in the short one - the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative."--Arthur C. Clarke

"How could you be a Great Man if history brought you no Great Events, or brought you to them at the wrong time, too young, too old?"--Lois McMaster Bujold

"Indeed, what is there that does not appear marvelous when it comes to our knowledge for the first time? How many things, too, are looked upon as quite impossible until they have been actually effected?"--Pliny the Elder

"The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny."--Ralph Waldo Emerson

"America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World's History shall reveal itself."--Georg W. Hegel

"Europe will never be like America. Europe is a product of history. America is a product of philosophy."--Margaret Thatcher

"The history of our race, and each individual's experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal."--Mark Twain

"America has never been an empire. We may be the only great power in history that had the chance, and refused, preferring greatness to power and justice to glory."--George W. Bush

"The peaceful transfer of authority is rare in history, yet common in our country. With a simple oath, we affirm old traditions and make new beginnings."--George W. Bush

"History knows no resting places and no plateaus."--Henry Kissinger

"History repeats itself. That's one of the things wrong with history."--Clarence Darrow

"It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature."--Henry James

"Men make history, and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better."--Harry S Truman

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe."--H. G. Wells

"It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."--Robert F. Kennedy

"A generation which ignores history has no past and no future."--Robert Heinlein

"I am responsible only to God and history."--Francisco Franco

"Women with pasts interest men... they hope history will repeat itself."--Mae West

"The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments."--William H. Borah

"There is a history in all men's lives."--William Shakespeare

"A page of history is worth a pound of logic."--Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.