"The presence of the past is more critical than the pastness of the past."
--Lee Durham Stone (2019)
Fallacy of tunnel history: "the tendency to divide historical events into simplified and self-contained causal strands."
--David Hackett Fischer, Historians' Fallacies: Towards a Logic of Historical Thought (1970), 142.
"America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future."
--Frederick Douglass, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" (July 5, 1852)
It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit.
It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.”
--Amanda Gorman, National Youth Poet Laureate, in "The Hill We Climb"
"Historical inquiry brings to light deeds of violence which took place at the origin of all political formations."
--Ernest Renan, "What Is a Nation?" (1882), in What Is a Nation and Other Political Writings (Internet Archive Wayback Machine), para. 10.
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