In the 1970s, family history wasn't yet thought of a serious field for study. I was terrified of being laughed at by other historians. I called my book 'The Social Origins of Private Life.' It should have been 'As Pompous as You Want to Be.' Every sentence was academic jargon, and if I said X, I qualified it with Y.
Most all of my awards are at the Country Music Hall of Fame. You know we had the longest running exhibit in the Hall of Fame history with Family Tradition. More people went to see Daddy's stuff and all the things I have collected over the years than any other exhibit.
Latin life is rich with warmth, family values and history. I want to bring that beauty into American homes.
Marxism, Freudianism, global warming. These are proof - of which history offers so many examples - that people can be suckers on a grand scale. To their fanatical followers they are a substitute for religion. Global warming, in particular, is a creed, a faith, a dogma that has little to do with science.
Gluttony might be innocuous were it not for the fact that gluttons tend to disregard whether their self-serving behaviors harm anyone else. We don't need to look far and wide to find examples of gluttonous behavior, as they are numerous throughout the history of capitalism.
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
For at the same time many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history.
I'd read up on the history of our country and I'd become fascinated with the story of the Alamo. To me it represented the fight for freedom, not just in America, but in all countries.
At BYU, I discovered history, then historiography. I became fascinated with the study of historians and historical trends, with the idea that the way we remember the past changes and shifts with our own preoccupations.
What fascinates me are the turning points where history could have been different.
As a community organizer who holds a degree in history, I understand the fascination with history. However, there is a tendency for many of us to get engrossed in the recounting of our history, which often amounts to purely intellectual activity without material action.
Fascism is a religion. The twentieth century will be known in history as the century of Fascism.
At the Oscars, if you didn't vote for '12 Years a Slave,' you were a racist. You have to be very careful about what you say. I do have particular views and opinions that most of this town doesn't share, but it's not like I'm a fascist or a racist. There's nothing like that in my history.
You look at the greatest villains in human history, the fascists, the autocrats, they all wanted people to kneel before them because they don't love themselves enough.
Our own CIA has a storied history of interfering in elections. In the late '40s, we shoveled cash into France and Italy after World War II to defeat the Communists who had been part of the wartime resistance to the Nazis and Fascists.
The worst pandemic in modern history was the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed tens of millions of people. Today, with how interconnected the world is, it would spread faster.
My father and I made genetics history. We were the first African-Americans and the first father and son anywhere to have their genomes sequenced.
Something new has happened: For the first time in German history our fatherland is guided by a plan that considers only the needs of the people, and aims at building prosperity and reconstructing of our fatherland.
I subscribe to William Faulkner's' view that history is not just about what we were before but who we are now.
Perhaps it is because I'm a writer trained in history that I've always assumed I would make mistakes in my drafts. Historians know how faulty human memory can be.
