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Us History Quotes

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Us History Quotes

“...the Anti-Imperialist League...carried on a long campaign to educate the American public about the horrors of the Philippine war and the evils of imperialism. It was...united in a common moral outrage at what was being done to the Filipinos in the name of freedom. Whatever their differences on other matters, they would all agree with William James's angry statement: 'God damn the U.S. for its vile conduct in the Philippine Isles'.”

HistoryAmerican HistoryUs HistoryPhilippinesFilipinoAmerican Imperialism
Book:A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present
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“What the states could not accomplish by law, they were more than willing to achieve by violence. The wholesale slaughter of African Americans in Colfax, Louisiana (1873), Wilmington, North Carolina (1898), and Ocoee, Florida (1920), resulted in the loss of hundreds of lives simply because whites were enraged that black people had voted.”

RacismWhite SupremacyUs HistorySuffrageVoter Suppression
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
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“Whites had already posted a sign on the black church in Taylor County, Georgia: "The first Negro to vote will never vote again." Snipes was not deterred. In July 1946, he cast his ballot in Taylor County's primary. In fact, he was the only black person to do so; and with that act of democratic bravery, Maceo Snipes signed his death warrant. A few days later four white men showed up at Snipes's house and demanded that he step outside. As he stood on the porch, they pointed their guns at him and began firing. Snipes staggered and fell to the ground. They just walked away. His mother ran out of the house and got him to the hospital, but in Jim Crow America, black patients did not have the right to health care. He lay in a room the size of a closet unattended for six hours bleeding, just bleeding. This strong man, this veteran, lingered for two more days, but the damage was too extensive, the medical treatment too slow, and Georgia's hate too deep.”

RacismWhite SupremacyUs HistoryVoter SuppressionRacial Violence
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
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“America was paralyzed; on one hand, by the power of the Southern Democrats in Congress, whose inordinate political strength and control of key committees was based on their ability to win reelection after reelection because of massive disfranchisement and racial terror; and on the other, by the missionary-like belief that America was the champion of democracy and freedom in the battle against the Soviet Union, whose death grip on human rights had no limits.”

RacismAmerican HistoryCold WarSoviet UnionUs HistoryVoter Suppression
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
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“The Civil Rights Act (1957), while seemingly a landmark piece of legislation, was actually a paper tiger that had no ability to protect the right to vote. The act did create the Civil Rights Commission, upgrade the Department of Justice's section on civil rights to a division, and authorize the U.S. attorney general to sue those violating the voting rights of American citizens. But it was—by design and implementation—no match for the entrenched resistance to black citizenship.”

RacismAmerican HistoryWhite SupremacyCivil Rights MovementUs HistorySuffrageVoter Suppression
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
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“The VRA was nevertheless a seismic shift in thought, action, and execution for the U.S. government when compared with the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and its equally enfeebled companion legislation of 1960. Rather than passively waiting for locales to violate the rights of American citizens and then sitting still until those who had been routinely brutalized by this system made a formal complaint, the VRA put the responsibility for adhering to the Constitution onto state and local governments.”

RacismAmerican HistoryCivil Rights MovementUs HistorySuffrageVoter SuppressionVoting Rights Act
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
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“Paul Weyrich, a conservative activist and founder of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which eventually crafted voter suppression legislation that spread like a cancer throughout the United States, was brutally clear: "I don't want everybody to vote.”

RacismAmerican HistoryUs HistorySuffrageVoter Suppression
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
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“All that had to happen was for the GOP to reinforce the lie of voter fraud, create the public perception of democracy imperiled, increase the groundswell to "protect the integrity of the ballot box," require exactly the type of identification that blacks, the poor, the young, and the elderly did not have, and, equally important, mask these acts of aggressive voter suppression behind the nobility of being "civic-minded.”

RacismAmerican HistoryUs HistorySuffrageAgeismVoter SuppressionVoter Fraud
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
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“A Republican seizure of power based not on the strength of the party's ideas but on massive disfranchisement denies citizens not only their rights, but also the "talisman" of humanity that voting represents. The lie of voter fraud breaks a World War II veteran down into a simple, horrifying statement: "I wasn't a citizen no more." It forces a man, a retired engineer who was instrumental in building this nation, into facing a bitter truth: "I am not wanted in this state." It eviscerates the key sense of self-worthy in a disabled man who has to pen the painful words "My constitutional rights have been stripped from me." It maligns thousands of African Americans who resiliently weathered the Missouri cold and hours of bureaucratic runarounds as nothing but criminals and frauds. It leaves a woman suffering from lung cancer absolutely "distraught" and convinced that "they prevented us from voting," because none of her IDs could penetrate Wisconsin's law. It shatters the dying wish of a woman who, in her last moments on earth, wanted to cast a vote for possibly the first woman president of the United States. But an expired driver's license meant none of that was to be.”

PoliticsRacismAmerican HistoryUs HistoryClassismVoter Suppression
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
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“Iowa congressman Steve King lamented the passing of "a time in American history when you had to be a male property owner in order to vote." Florida congressional candidate Ted Yoho echoed that sentiment when he also proffered, "You used to have to be a property owner to vote." Of course, after the Great Recession, with African American homeownership lower than it had been during the 1930s and the lowest of all ethnic and racial groups in the United States, the implications of the GOP longings were obvious.”

RacismAmerican HistoryUs HistoryClassismVoter Suppression
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
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“The anti-revolutionary temper of the Revolution belongs to 1787, not to 1776. Another element was at work, and it is the other element that is new, effective, characteristic, and added permanently to the experience of the world. The story of the revolted colonies impresses us first and most distinctly as the supreme manifestation of the law of resistance, as the abstract revolution in its purest and most perfect shape. No people was so free as the insurgents; no government less oppressive than the government which they overthrew. Those who deem Washington and Hamilton honest can apply the term to few European statesmen. Their example presents a thorn, not a cushion, and threatens all existing political forms, with the doubtful exception of the federal constitution of 1874. It teaches that men ought to be in arms even against a remote and constructive danger to their freedom; that even if the cloud is no bigger than a man’s hand, it is their right and duty to stake the national existence, to sacrifice lives and fortunes, to cover the country with a lake of blood, to shatter crowns and sceptres and fling parliaments into the sea. On this principle of subversion they erected their commonwealth, and by its virtue lifted the world out of its orbit and assigned a new course to history. Here or nowhere we have the broken chain, the rejected past, precedent and statute superseded by unwritten law, sons wiser than their fathers, ideas rooted in the future, reason cutting as clean as Atropos.”

AmericaRevolutionUsaUs HistoryAmerican RevolutionHistory Of AmericaWar Of Independence
Book:The History of Freedom and Other Essays
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“When Marquette asked his [Algonquin] guides what people lived on this river, they replied, "mihsoori", or "wehmihsoori" which in their Algonquin language describes a wooden canoe... Missouri is therefore translated as "people of wood canoes.”

HistoryNative AmericanIndigenousUs HistoryMissouriIndigenous PeoplesMissouri HeritageMissouri HistoryMissouriaNative History
Book:The People of the River's Mouth: In Search of the Missouria Indians (Missouri Heritage Readers)
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“Language is one way of determining relationships among American Indian nations. The Missouria are of the Siouan-language family, speaking a dialect known as the Chiwere. Other tribes speaking this dialect were the Ho Chunk (Winnebago), the Wahtohtana (Otoe, and the Baxoje (Ioway). William Clark said these tribes spoke the same language and correctly surmised they were "once one great nation.”

HistoryNative AmericanIndigenousUs HistoryMissouriIndigenous PeoplesMissouri HeritageMissouri HistoryMissouriaNative History
Book:The People of the River's Mouth: In Search of the Missouria Indians (Missouri Heritage Readers)
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“The United States, unlike its European cousins, had always preferred the indirect mode of domination, one which soon became the norm: formally independent and sovereign states, but heavily dependent on their metropolitan masters... The function of these formally independent states was to serve the economic needs of the imperial powers, at the cost of their own political and economic sovereignty. This often resulted in a plantation culture ruled by the production of a single commodity-- sugarcane, in the case of Cuba-- or the extraction of mineral and oil resources, as in Africa and the Middle East.”

PoliticalRevolutionSocialismCommunismUs HistoryCuban HistoryFidel CastroAnti Imperialism
Book:The Declarations of Havana
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“In South America a governing creole elite, ruling in most cases with US political and military support, held the continent with relative ease. Rebellions, such as that led by Sandino in Nicaragua, were isolated and crushed. Physical and cultural repression of the indigenous population (with the exception of Mexico) was regarded as normal. Populist experiments (Argentina and Brazil) did not last too long. Few thought of Cuba as the likely venue for the first anti-capitalist revolution. (Introduction by Tariq Ali)”

PoliticalRevolutionSocialismCommunismUs HistoryCuban HistoryFidel CastroAnti CapitalismAnti Imperialism
Book:The Declarations of Havana
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“I am compelled to plead my own defence before this Court. There are two reasons: first, because I have been deprived almost entirely of legal advice; second, because only he who has been outraged as deeply as I, and who has seen his country so forsaken, its justice so reviled, can speak on an occasion like this with words made of the blood of his own heart and the very marrow of truth.”

PoliticalRevolutionSocialismCommunismUs HistoryCuban HistoryFidel CastroAnti Imperialism
Book:The Declarations of Havana
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“What is the history of Cuba but the history of Latin America? And what is the history of Latin America but the history of Asia, Africa and Oceania? And what is the history of all these peoples but the history of the most pitiless and cruel exploitation by imperialism throughout the world? At the end of the last and the beginning of the present century a handful of economically developed nations had finished partitioning the world among themselves, subjecting to its economic and political domination two-thirds of humanity, which was thus forced to work for the ruling classes of the economically advanced capitalist countries.”

PoliticalRevolutionSocialismCommunismUs HistoryCuban HistoryFidel CastroAnti Imperialism
Book:The Declarations of Havana
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“What is it that is hidden behind the Yankees' hate of the Cuban Revolution? What is it that rationally explains the conspiracy, uniting for the same aggressive purpose the most powerful and rich imperialist power in the contemporary world and the oligarchies of an entire continent, which together are supposed to represent a population of 350 million human beings, against a small country of only seven million inhabitants, economically underdeveloped, without financial or military means to threaten the security or economy of any other country? What unites them and stirs them up is fear. What explains it is fear. Not fear of the Cuban Revolution but fear of the Latin American revolution.”

PoliticalRevolutionSocialismCommunismUs HistoryCuban HistoryFidel CastroAnti Imperialism
Book:The Declarations of Havana
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“I once two beautiful children playing together. One was a fair white child; the other was her slave, and also her sister. When I saw them embracing each other, and heard their joyous laughter, I turned sadly away from the lovely sight. I foresaw the inevitable blight that would follow on the little slave's heart. I knew how soon her laughter would be changed to sighs. The fair child grew up to be a still fairer woman. From childhood to womanhood her pathway was blooming with flowers, and overarched by a sunny sky. Scarcely one day of her life had been clouded when the sun rose on her happy bridal morning. How had those years dealt with her slave sister, the little playmate of her childhood? She, also, was very beautiful; but the flowers and sunshine of love were not for her. She drank the cup of sin, and shame, and misery, whereof her persecuted race are compelled to drink. In view of these things, why are ye silent, ye free men and women of the north? Why do your tongues falter in maintenance of the right? Would that I had more ability! But my heart is so full, and my pen is so weak! There are noble men and women who plead for us, striving to help those who cannot help themselves. God bless them! God give them strength and courage to go on! God bless those, every where, who are laboring to advance the cause of humanity!”

SlaveryAmerican HistoryBlack HistoryUs HistoryWhite SilenceWhite History
Book:Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
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“I have myself known two southern wives who exhorted their husbands to free those slaves towards whom they stood in a "parental relation;" and their request was granted. These husbands blushed before the superior nobleness of their wives' natures. Though they had only counseled them to do that which was their duty to do, it commanded their respect, and rendered their conduct more exemplary. Concealment was at an end, and confidence took the place of distrust.”

SlaveryAmerican HistoryUs HistorySouthern WomenThe South
Book:Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself
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“John [Adams] supposed there were two reasons why the British had gone after John Hancock. First, they wanted to make an example out of him, showing what would happen to anyone, no matter how rich, who dared to defy the new Townshend Act. Second, John Hancock was the biggest financial support of men like Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty. In fact, John Adams was reasonably sure that Sam Adams had no money whatsoever and that John Hancock was paying all his bills.”

HistoryAmerican HistoryBostonUs HistoryDeclaration Of IndependenceJohn AdamsSamuel AdamsThe American RevolutionJohn Hancock
Book:John Adams: Independence Forever
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“In those days the Pimas always had plenty. The Papagos who lived in the desert south of us did not have a river like the Gila to water their fields, and their food was never plentiful. During the summer months, some of them would come to our village, with cactus syrup put up in little ollas, and salt, and we would give them beans and corn in exchange. The only salt we had came from the Papagos. At a certain time of the year they would go down to the ocean and get the salt from the shore where the tide left the water to dry. It was a kind of ceremony with them. They always felt that we gave them more than they could give us, although to get the salt they had walked hundreds of miles to the ocean and back. And so they would stay with us for a few days and help us harvest our wheat.”

HistoryTradeNative AmericanUs History
Book:A Pima Remembers
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“The United States was not alone, however, in showing Washington due respect. Time had so changed that the British admiral made the sixty men-of-war off the English coast fly their flags at half-mast, for the very man whom his country had once wished to hang. In France, Napoleon Bonaparte ordered public mourning for ten days; for Washington's name was known and honored everywhere.”

InspirationalAmericaHistoryUnited StatesAmerican HistoryUs HistoryGeorge Washington
Book:The Story of the Americans
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“All that part of Creation that lies within our observation is liable to change... If we look into history, we shall find some nations rising from contemptible beginnings and spreading their influence, until the whole globe is subjected to their ways... England immediately upon this began to increase (the particular and minute cause of which I am not historian enough to trace) in power and magnificence, and is now the greatest nation upon the globe. Soon after the Reformation a few people came over into the new world for conscience sake. Perhaps this (apparently) trivial incident may transfer the great seat of empire into America. It looks likely to me. For if we can remove the turbulent Gallics, our people, according to the exactest computations, will in another century, become more numerous than England itself. Should this be the case, since we have (I may say) all the naval stores of the nation in our hands, it will be easy to obtain the mastery of the seas, and then the united force of all Europe will not be able to subdue us. The only way to keep us from setting up for ourselves is to disunite us... Keep us in distinct colonies... Be not surprised that I am turned politician. The whole town is immersed in politics.”

HistoryAmerican HistoryBiographyUs HistoryJohn AdamsThe American Revolution
Author:John Adams
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“Sometimes you hear people say: "Those Apaches were bad." I don't know. They are peaceful people today, doing a good job with their livestock. In the early days they did cause the Pimas, and others, some trouble. We had plenty from our farms and those Apaches only had what they could hunt over their wild mountains. Sometimes they would come down and raid us and we fought them back away from our settlements and then left them alone. They never tried to drive us off our land and away from our homes. We never tried to drive them out of their own country. But the white man did. If you were an Apache what do you think you would have done? (from chapter "The Apache Wars")”

HistoryNative AmericanColonialismUs History
Book:A Pima Remembers
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“Having voted for independence, they now needed to discuss and vote on the text of a declaration of independence that Thomas Jefferson had drawn up. The text Jefferson had written was read aloud, and throughout the day the delegates made changes. They deleted about twenty-five percent of the text, thinking it not applicable, or too emotive, or beside the point.”

InspirationalHistoryConstitutionAmerican HistoryWorld HistoryUs HistoryDeclaration Of IndependenceThomas JeffersonJohn Adams
Book:John Adams: Independence Forever
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“In 1890...the Magnolia State passed the Mississippi Plan, a dizzying array of poll taxes, literacy tests, understanding clauses, newfangled voter registration rules, and "good character" clauses—all intentionally racially discriminatory but dressed up in the genteel garb of bringing "integrity" to the voting booth.”

RacismAmerican HistoryWhite SupremacyUs HistorySuffrageVoter Suppression
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
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“Bilbo was pointing to the power of the literacy test and understanding clause, which were tailor-made for societies that systematically refused to educate millions of their citizens and ensured that the bulk of the population remained functionally illiterate...for most of the twentieth century, many Jim Crow school systems did not have high schools for African Americans.”

EducationRacismAmerican HistoryLiteracyUs HistorySuffrageVoter Suppression
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
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“Segregation laws were proposed as part of a deliberate effort to drive a wedge between poor whites and African Americans. These discriminatory barriers were designed to encourage lower-class whites to retain a sense of superiority over blacks, making it far less likely that they would sustain interracial political alliances aimed at toppling the white elite.”

RacismSegregationUs HistoryClassism
Book:The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
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“The radical philosophy offered, for many African Americans, the most promise. It was predicated on a searing critique of large corporations, particularly railroads, and the wealthy elite in the North and South. The radicals of the late nineteenth century, who later formed the Populist Party, viewed the privileged classes as conspiring to keep poor whites and blacks locked into a subordinate political and economic position. For many African American voters, the Populist approach was preferable to the paternalism of liberals.”

Us HistoryPopulismClassism
Book:The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
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“On February 8, 1928, known as Lindbergh day since it was the day he crossed the Atlantic Ocean the year before, Charles A. Lindbergh landed at the Campo Columbia airfield near Havana. Lindbergh had visited many countries in his plane, and he had the national flags of each country painted in the fuselage. Having flown from Haiti, on a Goodwill Tour of the Caribbean in his "Spirit of St. Louis," he had the Cuban flag painted on his a single-engine Ryan monoplane. It was the last country he visited before he donated the “Spirit of St. Louis" to the Smithsonian Institution, where it is still exhibited at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.”

AviationUs HistoryCaribbeanCuban History
Author:Captain Hank Bracker
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“The Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity or Libertad Act of 1996, better known as the Helms-Burton Act, was passed by the 104th United States Congress on March 6, 1996 and enacted into law by President Bill Clinton on March 12, 1996. Its intention was to bolster and continue the United States embargo against Cuba. It also opposes Cuban membership in international institutions, and prohibits commercial television broadcasts from the United States to Cuba. Further, the law provides for protection of the property rights of certain United States nationals and the property formerly owned by U.S. citizens but confiscated by Cuba after the Cuban revolution, The Act is named for the original sponsors, Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, and Representative Dan Burton of Indiana.”

Us HistoryCuban HistoryCuban RevolutionThe Exciting Story Of Cuba
Author:Captain Hank Bracker
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“Frank Fiorini, better known as Frank Sturgis, had an interesting career that started when he quit high school during his senior year to join the United States Marine Corps as an enlisted man. During World War II he served in the Pacific Theater of Operations with Edson’s Raiders, of the First Marine Raiders Battalion under Colonel “Red Mike.” In 1945 at the end of World War II, he received an honorable discharge and the following year joined the Norfolk, Virginia Police Department. Getting involved in an altercation with his sergeant, he resigned and found employment as the manager of the local Havana-Madrid Tavern, known to have had a clientele consisting primarily of Cuban seamen. In 1947 while still working at the tavern, he joined the U.S. Navy’s Flight Program. A year later, he received an honorable discharge and joined the U.S. Army as an Intelligence Officer. Again, in 1949, he received an honorable discharge, this time from the U.S. Army. Then in 1957, he moved to Miami where he met former Cuban President Carlos Prío, following which he joined a Cuban group opposing the Cuban dictator Batista. After this, Frank Sturgis went to Cuba and set up a training camp in the Sierra Maestra Mountains, teaching guerrilla warfare to Castro’s forces. He was appointed a Captain in Castro’s M 26 7 Brigade, and as such, he made use of some CIA connections that he apparently had cultivated, to supply Castro with weapons and ammunition. After they entered Havana as victors of the revolution, Sturgis was appointed to a high security, intelligence position within the reorganized Cuban air force. Strangely, Frank Sturgis returned to the United States after the Cuban Revolution, and mysteriously turned up as one of the Watergate burglars who were caught installing listening devices in the National Democratic Campaign offices. In 1973 Frank A. Sturgis, E. Howard Hunt, Eugenio R. Martínez, G. Gordon Liddy, Virgilio R. “Villo” González, Bernard L. Barker and James W. McCord, Jr. were convicted of conspiracy. While in prison, Sturgis feared for his life if anything he had done, regarding his associations and contacts, became public knowledge. In 1975, Sturgis admitted to being a spy, stating that he was involved in assassinations and plots to overthrow undisclosed foreign governments. However, at the Rockefeller Commission hearings in 1975, their concluding report stated that he was never a part of the CIA…. Go figure! In 1979, Sturgis surfaced in Angola where he trained and helped the rebels fight the Cuban-supported communists. Following this, he went to Honduras to train the Contras in their fight against the communist-supported Sandinista government. He also met with Yasser Arafat in Tunis, following which he was debriefed by the CIA. Furthermore, it is documented that he met and talked to the Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, or Carlos the Jackal, who is now serving a life sentence for murdering two French counter intelligence agents. On December 4, 1993, Sturgis suddenly died of lung cancer at the Veterans Hospital in Miami, Florida. He was buried in an unmarked grave south of Miami…. Or was he? In this murky underworld, anything is possible.”

Us HistoryCuban HistoryCuban Revolution
Author:Captain Hank Bracker, The Exciting Story of Cuba
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“The United States quietly began exporting food to Cuba in 2001, following the devastating hurricane Michelle. In 2000, President Clinton authorized the sale of certain humanitarian products and the United States is again the island's primary food supplier. Annual food sales to Cuba peaked at $710 million in 2008. The Latin American Working Group coordinates relief efforts with Cuba in times of need. There has been a lengthy history binding the two countries, which should not be forgotten. American corporate abuses on the island nation is one of the overwhelming factors deterring Cuba from stabilizing affairs with the United States and the fact that Cuba’s government is a dictatorial, communistic régime stands in the way of the United States opening negotiations with them. Guantánamo Naval Base has been held for a long period of time, perhaps too long, and for questionable reasons, whereas Cuba has incarcerated people for political reasons, including some Americans, for far too long. Families have been divided and animosities have continued. Special interest groups, including a very vocal Cuban population in South Florida, continue to block the U.S. Government from initiating reasonable legislature regarding U.S. interests in Cuba, while many other countries carry on normal relations with the country. What is happening now is a reversal and counterproductive. It would seem that now should be a good time for the U.S. and Cuba to become reasonably good neighbors again….”

HurricanesUs HistoryCuban HistorySeastoriesCuban Politics
Author:Captain Hank Bracker, "The Exciting Story of Cuba"
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