A Quote by Samantha Power
History is laden with belligerent leaders using humanitarian rhetoric to mask geopolitical aims. History also shows how often ill-informed moralism has led to foreign entanglements that do more harm than good.
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Too often, ill-informed rhetoric has led to emotional hysteria that obfuscates solid evidence regarding the real problems faced by poor people and, in overwhelmingly great proportions, by black people.
Why is history important? Without history, many people have no idea how many of today's half-baked ideas have been tried, again and again - and have repeatedly led to disaster. Most of these ideas are not new. They are just being recycled with re-treaded rhetoric.
I wanted to be a part of history and not just a recorder and teacher of history. So that kind of attitude towards history, history itself as a political act, has always informed my writing and my teaching.
History shows that nations are more fragile than their citizens think. No nation in history has survived the ravages of time.
We also had a beautiful feature where the writer used the story of two mentally ill relatives, one of whom killed his dad, to explore the history of how we deinstitutionalized the mentally ill, only to re-institutionalize them - but in jails and prisons. There's much more to come.
Incredibly deep research combines with the talents of a fine historian and writer to produce superb narrative history. The true character and relationship of these two iconic westerners emerge to suppress myth and correct more than a century of tomes laden with bad history.
I feel history is more of a story than a lesson. I know this idea of presentism: this idea of constantly evoking the past to justify the present moment. A lot of people will tell you, "history is how we got here." And learning from the lessons of history. But that's imperfect. If you learn from history you can do things for all the wrong reasons.
History shows that, more often than not, loss of sovereignty leads to liberalisation imposed in the interests of the powerful.
What creates freedom? A revolution in the streets? Mass protest? Civil war? A change of government? The ousting of the old guard and its replacement by the new? History, more often than not, shows that hopes raised by such events are often dashed, sooner rather than later.
Leaders of nations, and people whose wealth or fame gives them power over the lives of others quite often do more harm than good.
Long view of history shows evil triumphing more often than we'd like to admit. That's just how it is. I don't despair too much about dying, either. It's just a fact of being human.
I am interested in constitutional history, political history, the history of foreign affairs, but I think you can get at those subjects through the details of daily life.
I've always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history.
We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage - almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence. And surely this is, often enough, an adequate description. But history is also the narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance.
Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.
True there has been more talk of peace since 1945 than, I should think, at any other time in history. At least we hear more and read more about it because man's words, for good or ill, can now so easily reach the millions.
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