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Tony Horwitz

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Famous Tony Horwitz Quotes

“A bookish man, he read widely, but rarely in search of new knowledge. Instead, he sought confirmation of his preexisting fantasy about an orient that lay almost on Europe’s doorstep. This dream drove him across the ocean sea, where he saw and heard things already in his own head; sirens, cannibals, subjects of the great Kahn, even an island off Hispaniola inhabited by Amazons. Other men of his day had clearer vision. “The hidden half of the globe is brought to light,” Peter Martyris, an Italian historian in the Spanish court wrote upon Columbus’ return from his first voyage in 1493. The next year, Martyris became the first European to refer to the Indies as “Ab orbe novo.” The New World. Yet Columbus never grasped the immensity of what he’d done. The more he saw, the less he learned. Mysticism, and dreams of the Orient kept overwhelming the evidence of his own senses.”

HistoryColonialismChristopher ColumbusThe New World
Book:A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World
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“I wandered over to the adobe birthplace of Ignacio Seguin Zaragoza, whose father was posted at the garrison in the early 1800s. Zaragoza went on to become a national hero in Mexico, leading a reformist revolt against Santa Anna and defeat- ing an invading French force on May 5, 1862, the date celebrated as Cinco de Mayo. While exploring the birthplace, I met Alberto Perez, a history and so- cial studies teacher in the Dallas area who was visiting with his family. When I confessed my ignorance of Zaragoza, he smiled and said, "You're not alone. A lot of Texans don't know him, either, or even that Mexico had its own fight for independence." The son of Mexican immigrants, Perez had taught at a predominantly Hispanic school in Dallas named for Zaragoza. Even there, he'd found it hard to bring nuance to students' understanding of Mexico and Texas in the nineteenth century. "The word 'revolution' slants it from the start," he said. "It makes kids think of the American Revolution and throwing off oppression." Perez tried to balance this with a broader, Mexican perspective. Anglos had been invited to settle Texas and were granted rights, citizenship, and considerable latitude in their adherence to distant authority. Mexico's aboli- tion of slavery, for instance, had little force on its northeastern frontier, where Southerners needed only to produce a "contract" that technically la- beled their human chattel as indentured servants. "Then the Anglos basically decided, 'We don't like your rules,"" Perez said. "This is our country now.”

HistoryTexasCinco De MayoZaragoza
Book:Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide
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