top of page

"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.

​

bottom of page