Collected by Ernest Davis
January 25, 2025
Never was there a greater contrast, never a more sudden transition than this!
That was startling. I am pretty sure I have never before seen a history book whose first sentence ends with an exclamation point. In fact, I can't think of any book of any kind whose first sentence ends with an exclamation point, though no doubt there are some.
However, I could certainly think of other history books that have an opening that is notable in terms of their literary quality. So I decided to put together a collection of some of these. Below are the first paragraphs of either the preface or chapter 1 of twenty-seven history books that seem to me to have striking literary qualities, as history books go. They are arranged in chronological order by date of original publication.
Even in this small collection, one can see general categories and individual special cases. The various openings can be:
They can also be grouped in terms of style and tone. This is, of course, more subjective and debatable, but I would say: Hume, Gibbon, Macaulay, Pirenne, Arendt, and Clark are Olympian. Tocqueville, Graetz, Pirenne, Bloch, Lewis, and Brotton, are scholarly. Carlyle, Spengler, and Hazard are rhetorical. Solzhenitsyn is literary. Polybius, Livy, Josephus, and Clarendon are convoluted. Gregory, Starkey, Judt, Wulf, Taylor, and Daston are in a plain style. Okrent and Wilkerson are chatty.
The books currently included are quite haphazard; I started with a few that I remembered, and a few I thought worthwhile checking. However, the great thing about an online collection is that it is easy to expand, and one of the many great things about my family and friends is that they have read a lot more history than I have. So I will be delighted if anyone wants to suggest history book openings that I should add here. Two ground rules, though: First, the books can be history of any kind — general history, history of a particular time and place, history of art, science, philosophy etc. — but not memoirs or biographies, which have a very different structure. Second, what I am looking for is literary interest — not necessarily literary quality — in the opening paragraphs. I am not interested in drab openings for otherwise great books. Thucydides and Tacitus were great historians and great writers, but their openings seems to me pretty flat. A book that begins ``The documentation of the history of domestic industries of Brabant in the Middle Ages falls primarily into three categories," may have all kinds of virtues, and it may be characteristic of an important school of historians, but it is not going in this collection.
About half of these are translations. I made some effort to choose a good translation, but not a heroic effort to find the best translation. So if you know of a better translation, by all means let me know.
Disclaimer: I am not at all endorsing the historical point of view of these various quotations. I am not even endorsing these passages as models of historical writing to be followed. Hume is contemptuous of societies that he considers "uncivilized". The passage from Macaulay is nationalistic bombast. The passage from Starkey is, probably, historically unjustified psychologizing. The passage from Spengler is more than a little nutty. However, I find them all compelling reading, in their various ways.
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Had the praise of History been passed over by former chroniclers it would perhaps have been incumbent upon me to urge the choice and special study of records of this sort, as the readiest means men can have of correcting their knowledge of the past. But my predecessors have not been sparing in this respect. They have all begun and ended, so to speak, by enlarging on this theme: asserting again and again that the study of History is in the truest sense an education, and a training for political life; and that the most instructive, or rather the only, method of learning to bear with dignity the vicissitudes of fortune is to recall the catastrophes of others. It is evident, therefore, that no one need think it his duty to repeat what has been said by many, and said well. Least of all myself: for the surprising nature of the events which I have undertaken to relate is in itself sufficient to challenge and stimulate the attention of every one, old or young, to the study of my work. Can any one be so indifferent or idle as not to care to know by what means, and under what kind of polity, almost the whole inhabited world was conquered and brought under the dominion of the single city of Rome, and that too within a period of not quite fifty-three years? Or who again can be so completely absorbed in other subjects of contemplation or study, as to think any of them superior in importance to the accurate understanding of an event for which the past affords no precedent.
Polybius, The Histories c. 130 BCE, trans. Evelyn Shuckburgh
****************************************************************************Whether I shall produce a work of any importance, if I fully recount the history of the Roman people from the first beginning of the city, I neither feel certain, nor, if I did, should I dare to say, being aware, as I am, that it is an undertaking at once old and hackneyed, seeing that that there are always new historians who fancy that there are always new historians who fancy that they will be able either to produce something more authentic as to the facts, or to excel the unpolished writers of antiquity in the matter of style. However, that may be, I shall at any rate have the satisfaction of thinking that I, as well as others, as far as a man can do, have done my best to perpetuate the record of a people who ruled the world: and if, amidst such a crowd of historians, my reputation should remain in obscurity, I may consult myself with the celebrity and high position of those who will eclipse my renown. The subject, moreover, is both one that involves immense toil, seeing that it reaches back over a period of more than seven hundred years, and is one that, having started from small beginnings, has grown to such an extent, that it has now become unwieldy from the abundance of its material: and, in the case of the majority of readers, I have no doubt that its first beginning and the events immediately succeeding them will afford less enjoyment to those who are hurrying on to the events of recent times by which the strength of this over-powerful people has long since been wearing itself out. I, on the contrary, shall further aim at this as the reward of my labor — to withdraw myself from the view of the calamities, which our age has witnessed for so many years, at any rate so long as I am reviewing with my whole attention those early times, free from every care, which, although it could not turn the writer's mind aside from the truth, might yet render him anxious.*
Livy, History of Rome. c. 20 BCE. trans. J.H. Freese
* I have to admit I am really not sure what Livy is saying at the end of this passage. I looked at a few translations, and none of them make it clear. My sister Abby suggests, very plausibly, that what Livy means that he feels safer writing about ancient times than recent ones, because he is less likely to offend one of his readers, but he is deliberately being cautiously obscure even about how he words that.
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Whereas the war which the Jews made with the Romans hath been the greatest of all those, not only that have been in our times, but, in a manner, of those that ever were heard of; both of those wherein cities have fought against cities, or nations against nations; while some men who were not concerned in the affairs themselves have gotten together vain and contradictory stories by hearsay, and have written them down after a sophistical manner; and while those that were there present have given false accounts of things, and this either out of a humor of flattery to the Romans, or of hatred towards the Jews; and while their writings contain sometimes accusations, and sometimes encomiums, but no where the accurate truth of the facts; I have proposed to myself, for the sake of such as live under the government of the Romans, to translate those books into the Greek tongue, which I formerly composed in the language of our country, and sent to the Upper Barbarians; Joseph, the son of Matthias, by birth a Hebrew, a priest also, and one who at first fought against the Romans myself, and was forced to be present at what was done afterwards, [am the author of this work].
Josephus, The War of the Jews c. 75 CE trans. William Whiston
Suggested by Joseph Davis
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A great many things keep happening, some of them good, some of them bad. The inhabitants of different countries keep quarrelling fiercely with each other, and kings go on losing their tempers in the most furious ways. Our churches are attacked by the heretics and then protected by the Catholics; the faith of Christ burns bright in many men but is lukewarm in others; no sooner are the church-buildings endowed by the faithful than they are stripped bare by those who have no faith. However, no writer has come to the fore who has been sufficiently skilled in setting things down in an orderly fashion to be able to describe these events in prose or in verse. In fact, in the towns of Gaul, the writing of literature has declined to the point where it has virtually disappeared altogether. Many people have complained about this, not once, but time and time again. `What a poor period this is,' they have been heard to say, `if among all our people there is not one man to be found who can write a book about what is happening today, the pursuit of letters really is dead among us!
I have often thought about these complaints and others like them. I have written this book to keep alive the memory of those dead and gone, and to bring them to the notice of future generations. My style is not very polished, and I have had to devote much of my space to the quarrels between the wicked and the righteous. All the same, I have been greatly encouraged by certain kind remarks made by our folk, to the effect that few people can understand a rhetorical speechifier, whereas many can follow a blunt speaker.
Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks, c. 590 trans. Lewis Thorpe
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That posterity may not be deceived, by the prosperous wickedness of these times, into an opinion, that less than a general combination, and universal apostasy in the whole nation from their religion and allegiance, could, in so short a time, have produced such a total and prodigious alteration and confusion over the whole kingdom; and so the memory of those few, who, out of duty and conscience, have opposed and resisted that torrent, which hath overwhelmed them, may lose the recompense due to their virtue; and having undergone the injuries and reproaches of this, may not find a vindication in a better age; it will not be unuseful, at least to the curiosity if not the conscience of men, to present to the world a full and clear narration of the grounds, circumstances, and artifices of this rebellion; not only from the time since the flame hath been visible in a civil war, but, looking farther back, from those former passages, accident, and actions, by which the seedplots were made and framed, from whence these mischiefs have successively grown to the height they are now at.
Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England 1648.
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The curiosity entertained by all civilized nations, of inquiring into the exploits and adventures of their ancestors, commonly excites a regret that the history of remote ages should always be so much involved in obscurity, uncertainty, and contradiction. Ingenious men, possessed of leisure, are apt to push their researches beyond the period in which literary monuments are framed or preserved; without reflecting, that the history of past events is immediately lost or disfigured when intrusted to memory and oral tradition, and that the adventures of barbarous nations, even if they were recorded, could afford little or no entertainment to men born in a more cultivated age. The convulsions of a civilized state usually compose the most instructive and most interesting part of its history; but the sudden, violent, and unprepared revolutions incident to barbarians, are so much guided by caprice, and terminate so often in cruelty, that they disgust us by the uniformity of their appearance; and it is rather fortunate for letters that they are buried in silence and oblivion. The only certain means by which nations can indulge their curiosity in researches concerning their remote origin, is to consider the language, manners, and customs of their ancestors, and to compare them with those of the neighboring nations. The fables, which are commonly employed to supply the place of true history, ought entirely to be disregarded; or if any exception be admitted to this general rule, it can only be in favor of the ancient Grecian fictions, which are so celebrated and so agreeable, that they will ever be the objects of the attention of mankind. Neglecting, therefore, all traditions, or rather tales, concerning the more early history of Britain, we shall only consider the state of the inhabitants as it appeared to the Romans on their invasion of this country: we shall briefly run over the events which attended the conquest made by that empire, as belonging more to Roman than British story: we shall hasten through the obscure and uninteresting period of Saxon annals; and shall reserve a more full narration for those times, when the truth is both so well ascertained, and so complete, as to promise entertainment and instruction to the reader.
David Hume, The History of England, 1754.
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In the second century of the Christian Era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valor. The gentle but powerful influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury. The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence: the Roman senate appeared to possess the sovereign authority, and devolved on the emperors all the executive powers of government. During a happy period of more than fourscore years, the public administration was conducted by the virtue and abilities of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the two Antonines. It is the design of this, and of the two succeeding chapters, to describe the prosperous condition of their empire; and afterwards, from the death of Marcus Antoninus, to deduce the most important circumstances of its decline and fall; a revolution which will ever be remembered, and is still felt by the nations of the earth.
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1776
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President Hénault, remarking on royal Surnames of Honour how difficult it often is to ascertain not only why, but even when, they were conferred, takes occasion in his sleek official way, to make a philosophical reflection. "The Surname of Bien-aimé (Well-beloved),” says he, “which Louis XV bears, will not leave posterity in the same doubt. This Prince, in the year 1744, while hastening from one end of his kingdom to the other, and suspending his conquests in Flanders that he might fly to the assistance of Alsace, was arrested at Metz by a malady which threatened to cut short his days. At the news of this, Paris, all in terror, seemed a city taken by storm: the churches resounded with supplications and groans; the prayers of priests and people were every moment interrupted by their sobs: and it was from an interest so dear and tender that this Surname of Bien-aimé fashioned itself — a title higher still than all the rest which this great Prince has earned."
So stands it written; in lasting memorial of that year 1744. Thirty other years have come and gone; and "this great Prince" again lies sick; but in how altered circumstances now! Churches resound not with excessive groanings; Paris is stoically calm: sobs interrupt no prayers, for indeed none are offered; except Priests’ Litanies, read or chanted at fixed money-rate per hour, which are not liable to interruption. The shepherd of the people has been carried home from Little Trianon, heavy of heart, and been put to bed in his own Château of Versailles: the flock knows it, and heeds it not. At most, in the immeasurable tide of French Speech (which ceases not day after day, and only ebbs towards the short hours of night), may this of the royal sickness emerge from time to time as an article of news. Bets are doubtless depending; nay, some people "express themselves loudly in the streets." But for the rest, on green field and steepled city, the May sun shines out, the May evening fades; and men ply their useful or useless business as if no Louis lay in danger.
Dame Dubarry, indeed, might pray, if she had a talent for it; Duke d’Aiguillon too, Maupeou and the Parlement Maupeou: these, as they sit in their high places, with France harnessed under their feet, know well on what basis they continue there. Look to it, D’Aiguillon; sharply as thou didst, from the Mill of St. Cast, on Quiberon and the invading English; thou, "covered if not with glory yet with meal!" Fortune was ever accounted inconstant: and each dog has but his day.
Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution 1837.
Suggested by Abby Davis
[Lytton Strachey mocks this passage, in his essay on Carlyle in Portraits in Miniature: "Perhaps it is the platitude of such a state of mind that is its most exasperating quality. Surely, one thinks, poor Louis XV might be allowed to die without a sermon from Chelsea. But no! The opportunity must not be missed; the preacher draws a long breath, and expatiates with elaborate emphasis upon all that is most obvious about mortality, crowns, and the futility of self-indulgence." ]
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I purpose to write the history of England from the accession of King James the Second down to a time which is within the memory of men still living. I shall recount the errors which, in a few months, alienated a loyal gentry and priesthood from the House of Stuart. I shall trace the course of that revolution which terminated the long struggle between our sovereigns and their parliaments, and bound up together the rights of the people and the title of the reigning dynasty. I shall relate how the new settlement was, during many troubled years, successfully defended against foreign and domestic enemies; how, under that settlement, the authority of law and the security of property were found to be compatible with a liberty of discussion and of individual action never before known; how, from the auspicious union of order and freedom, sprang a prosperity of which the annals of human affairs had furnished no example; how our country, from a state of ignominious vassalage, rapidly rose to the place of umpire among European powers; how her opulence and her martial glory grew together; how, by wise and resolute good faith, was gradually established a public credit fruitful of marvels which to the statesmen of any former age would have seemed incredible; how a gigantic commerce gave birth to a maritime power, compared with which every other maritime power, ancient or modern, sinks into insignificance; how Scotland, after ages of enmity, was at length united to England, not merely by legal bonds, but by indissoluble ties of interest and affection; how, in America, the British colonies rapidly became far mightier and wealthier than the realms which Cortes and Pizarro had added to the dominions of Charles the Fifth; how in Asia, British adventurers founded an empire not less splendid and more durable than that of Alexander.
Nor will it be less my duty faithfully to record disasters mingled with triumphs, and great national crimes and follies far more humiliating than any disaster. It will be seen that even what we justly account our chief blessings were not without alloy. It will be seen that the system which effectually secured our liberties against the encroachments of kingly power gave birth to a new class of abuses from which absolute monarchies are exempt. It will be seen that, in consequence partly of unwise interference, and partly of unwise neglect, the increase of wealth and the extension of trade produced, together with immense good, some evils from which poor and rude societies are free. It will be seen how, in two important dependencies of the crown, wrong was followed by just retribution; how imprudence and obstinacy broke the ties which bound the North American colonies to the parent state; how Ireland, cursed by the domination of race over race, and of religion over religion, remained indeed a member of the empire, but a withered and distorted member, adding no strength to the body politic, and reproachfully pointed at by all who feared or envied the greatness of England.
Yet, unless I greatly deceive myself, the general effect of this chequered narrative will be to excite thankfulness in all religious minds, and hope in the breasts of all patriots. For the history of our country during the last hundred and sixty years is eminently the history of physical, of moral, and of intellectual improvement. Those who compare the age on which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in their imagination may talk of degeneracy and decay: but no man who is correctly informed as to the past will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.
Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James , 1848
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Philosophers and statesmen may learn a valuable lesson of modesty from the history of our Revolution, for there were never events greater, better prepared, longer matured, and yet so little foreseen.
With all his genius, Frederick the Great had no perception of what was at hand. He touched the Revolution, so to speak, but he did not see it. More than this, while he seemed to be acting according to his own impulse, he was, in fact, its forerunner and agent. Yet he did not recognize its approach; and when at length it appeared full in view, the new and extraordinary characteristics which distinguished it from the common run of revolutions escaped his notice.
Abroad, it excited universal curiosity. It gave birth to a vague notion that a new era was at and. Nations entertained indistinct hopes of changes and reforms, but no one suspected what they were to be. Princes and ministers did not even feel the confused presentiment which it stirred in the minds of their subjects. They viewed it simply as one of those chronic diseases to which every national constitution is subject, and whose only effect is to pave the way for political enterprises on the part of neighbors.
Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution 1856. (trans. John Bonner)
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The most celebrated system of jurisprudence known to the world begins, as it ends, with a Code. From the commencement to the close of its history, the expositors of Roman Law consistently employed language which implied that the body of their system rested on the Twelve Decemviral Tables, and therefore on a basis of written law. Except in one particular, no institutions anterior to the Twelve Tables were recognised at Rome. The theoretical descent of Roman jurisprudence from a code, the theoretical ascription of English law to immemorial unwritten tradition, were the chief reasons why the development of their system differed from the development of ours. Neither theory corresponded exactly with the facts, but each produced consequences of the utmost importance.
James Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law , 1861.
Suggested by Nicholas Denyer
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It was on a spring day that some pastoral tribes passed across the Jordan into a strip of land which can only be regarded as an extended coast-line of the Mediterranean. This was the land of Canaan, subsequently called Palestine. The crossing of the Jordan and the entry into this territory were destined to become of the utmost importance to mankind. the land of which the shepherd tribes possessed themselves became the arena of great events, so enduring and important in their results, that the country in which they took place became known as the Holy Land. Distant nations had no conceptions that the entry of the Hebrew or Israelite tribes into the land of Canaan would have such momentous consequences. Even the inhabitants of Palestine were far from recognizing in this invasion an occurrence fraught with vital significance to themselves.
Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, 1874. trans. Bella Löwy
Suggested by Joseph Davis.
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In this book is attempted for the first time the venture of predetermining history, of following the still untravelled stages in the destiny of a Culture, and specifically of the only Culture of our time and on our planet which is actually in the phase of fulfilment — the West-European-American.
Hitherto the possibility of solving a problem so far-reaching has evidently never been envisaged, and even if it had been so, the means of dealing with it were either altogether unsuspected or, at best, inadequately used.
Is there a logic of history? Is there, beyond all the casual and incalculable elements of the separate events, something that we may call a metaphysical structure of historic humanity, something that is essentially independent of the outward forms — social, spiritual, and political — which we see so clearly? Are not these actualities indeed secondary or derived from that something. Does world-history present to the seeing eye certain grand traits, again and again, with sufficient constancy to justify certainly conclusions? And if so, what are the limits to which reasoning from such premises may be pushed?
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, 1918. (trans. Charles Francis Atkinson).
****************************************************************************Never was there a greater contrast, never a more sudden transition than this! An hierarchical system ensured by authority; life firmly based on dogmatic principles — such were the things held dear by the people of the seventeenth century; but these — control, authority, dogmas, and the like — were the very things that their immediate successors held in cordial detestation. The former were upholders of Christianity; the latter were its foes. The former believed in the laws of God; the latter in the laws of Nature; the former lived contentedly enough in a world composed of unequal social grades; of the latter, the one absorbing dream was Equality.
Of course, the younger generation are always critical of their elders. They always imagine that the world has only been awaiting their arrival and intervention to become a better and a happier place. But it needs a great deal more than that, a great deal more than such a mild troubling of the waters, to account for a change so abrupt and so decisive as that we are now considering. One day, the French people, almost to a man, were thinking like Bousset. The day after, they were thinking like Voltaire. No ordinary swing of the pendulum, that. It was a revolution.
Paul Hazard, The Crisis of the European Mind, 1680=1715 1935. (trans. J. Lewis May).
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Of all the features of that wonderful human structure, the Roman Empire, the most striking, and also the most essential, was its Mediterranean character. Although in the East it was Greek, and in the West, Latin, its Mediterranean character gave it a unity which impressed itself upon the provinces as a whole. The inland sea, in the full sense of the term Mare nostrum, was the vehicle of ideas, and religions, and merchandise. The provinces of the North — Belgium, Britain, Germany, Raetia, Noricum, Pannonia — were merely outlying ramparts against barbarism. Life was concentrated on the shores of the great lake. Without it Rome could not have been supplied with African wheat. It was more beneficent than ever now that it could be navigated in perfect security, since piracy had long disappeared. On the roads that led thither from all the provinces the traffic of these provinces converged upon the sea. As one travelled away from it civilization became more rarefied. The last great city of the North was Lyons. Trèves owed its greatness only to its rank of temporary capital. All the other cities of importance — Carthage, Alexandria, Naples, Antioch — were on or near the sea.
Henri Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne, 1937. (I can't find the translator.)
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"You see before you the wrath of the Lord breaking forth ... There is naught but towns emptied of their folk, monasteries razed to the ground or given to the flames, fields desolated ... Everywhere the strong oppresseth the weak and men are like fish of the sea that blindly devour each other." Thus, in 909, the bishops of the province of Rheims assembled at Trosly. The literature of the ninth and tenth centuries, the charters, and the deliberation of councils are full of such lamentations. When all allowance has been made both for exaggeration and for the pessimism natural to religious orators, we are forced to see in this incessantly recurring theme, supported as it was by so much contemporary evidence, the proof of a state of affairs regarded as intolerable even in those days. Certainly it was a period when those who were capable of observing and making comparisons, the clergy in particular, felt themselves to be living in a hateful atmosphere of disorder and violence. Feudalism was born in the midst of an infinitely troubled epoch, and in some measure it was the child of those troubles themselves, But some of the causes which helped to create or maintain this disorderly environment were altogether foreign to the internal evolution of European societies. Forged several centuries earlier in the fiery crucible of the Germanic invasions, the new civilization of the West, in its turn, seemed like a citadel besieged — indeed more than half overrun. It was attacked from three sides at once: in the south by the devotees of Islam; in the east by the Hungarians; and in the north by the Scandinavians.
Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, 1940
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One does not commonly shape destiny at the age of nine or eleven, and until the middle of January, 1692, Betty and Abigail had given no indication that they were about to do so. Before that time it was possible for visitors to the parsonage in Salem Village to ignore the little girls they found there.
The children in question were the Reverend Samuel Parris's nine-year-old daughter Betty, and her cousin and senior by two years, Abigail Williams. In this early phase they were quite ordinary children, and not prodigies at all. The pair of them, got up like small prim matrons in long-gown, apron, and kerchief, absorbed in knitting or some other small household duty, presented a pretty picture of carefree innocence.
The appearance of children, however, may be deceiving, as even adults should know, especially in this time and place where nearly everyone had once endured the rigors of a Calvinist childhood. Though Betty was a really sweet, biddable little girl, ready to obey anyone who spoke with conviction, including, to her misfortune, her playmate Abigail, she was not carefree. She had been exposed too long to the hell-fire in her father's composition. And Abigail, exposed too, but somehow responding differently, was not innocent; from the eyes of this child an authentic hellion looked out on a world it would make over if it got a chance.
Marion Starkey, The Devil in Massachusetts, 1949.
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Many still consider it an accident that Nazi ideology centered around antisemitism, and that Nazi policy, consistently and uncompromisingly, aimed at the persecution and finally the extermination of the Jews. Only the horror of the final catastrophe, and even more the homelessness and the uprootedness of the survivors made the "Jewish question" so prominent in everyday political life. What the Nazis themselves claimed as their chief discovery — the role of the Jewish people in world politics — and their chief interest — persecution of Jews all over the world — have been regarded by public opinion as a pretext for winning the masses or an interesting device of demagogy.
The failure to take seriously what the Nazis themselves said is comprehensible enough. There is hardly an aspect of contemporary history more irritating and mystifying than the fact that of all the great unsolved political questions of our century, it should have been this seemingly small and unimportant Jewish problem that had the dubious honor of setting the whole infernal machine in motion. Such discrepancies between cause and effect outrage our common sense, to say nothing of the historian's sense of balance and harmony. Compared with the events themselves, all the explanations of antisemitism look as if they had been hastily and hazardously contrived to cover up an issue which so gravely threatens our sense of proportion and our hope for sanity.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
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On a February day in the year A.D. 638 the Caliph Omar entered Jerusalem, riding on a white camel. He was dressed in worn, filthy robes, and the army that followed him was rough and unkempt; but its discipline was perfect. At his side was the Patriarch Sophronius, as chief magistrate of the surrendered city. Omar rode straight to the site of the Temple of Solomon, whence his friend Mahomet had ascended into Heaven. Watching him stand there, the Patriarch remembered the words of Christ and murmured through his tears: "Behold the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet."
Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades. 1951
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The rough outline of our literary history in the sixteenth century is not very difficult to grasp. At the beginning we find a literature still medieval in form and spirit. In Scotland it shows the highest level of technical brilliance; in England it has for many years been dull, feeble, and incompetent. As the century proceeds, new influences arise: changes in our knowledge of antiquity, new poetry from Italy and France, new theology, new movements in philosophy and science. As these increase, though not necessarily because of them, the Scotch literature is almost completely destroyed. In England, the characteristic disease of late medieval poetry, its metrical disorder, is healed; but replaced, for the most part, by a lifeless and labored regularity to which some ears might prefer the vagaries of Lydgate. There is hardly any sign of a new inspiration. Except for the songs of Wyatt, whose deepest roots are medieval, and the prose of the Prayer Book, which is mostly translation, authors seem to have forgotten the lessons that had been mastered in the Middle Ages and learned little in their stead. Their prose is clumsy, monotonous, garrulous; their verse astonishingly tame and cold, or, if it attempts to rise, the coarsest fustian. In both mediums we come to dread a certain ruthless emphasis; bludgeon-work. Nothing is light, or tender, or fresh. All the authors write like elderly men. The mid-century is an earnest, heavy-handed, commonplace age: a drab age. Then, in the last quarter of the century, the unpredictable happens. With startling suddenness we ascend. Fantasy, conceit, paradox, colour, incantation return. Youth returns. The fine frenzies of ideal love and ideal war are readmitted. Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Hooker — even, in a way, Lyly — display what is almost a new culture; that culture which was to last through most of the seventeenth century and to enrich the very meanings of the words England and Aristocracy. Nothing in the earlier history of our period would have enabled the sharpest observer to foresee this transformation.
C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama. 1954.
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I am standing on the Pont des Arts in Paris. On one side of the Seine is the harmonious, reasonable façade of the Institute of France, built as a college in about 1670. On the other bank is the Louvre, built continuously from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century: classical architecture at its most splendid and assured. Just visible upstream is the Cathedral of Notre Dame — not perhaps the most lovable of cathedrals, but the most rigorously intellectual façade in the whole of Gothic art. The houses that line the banks of the river are also a humane and reasonable solution of what town architecture should be, and in front of them, under the trees, are the open bookstalls where generations of students have found intellectual nourishment and generations of amateurs have indulged in the civilized past time of book collecting. Across this bridge, for the last one hundred and fifty years, students from the art schools of Paris have hurried to the Louvre to study the works of art that it contains, and then back to their studios to talk and dream of doing something worthy of the great tradition. And on this bridge how many pilgrims from America, from Henry James downward, have paused and breathed in the aroma of a long-established culture, and felt themselves to be at the very center of civilization.
Kenneth Clark, Civilisation: A Personal View, 1969
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How do people get to this clandestine Archipelago? Hour by hour planes fly there, ships steer their course there, and trains thunder off to it — but all with nary a mark on them to tell of their destination. And at ticket windows or at travel bureus for Soviet or foreign tourists the employees would be astounded if you were to ask for a ticket to go there. They know nothing and they've never heard of the Archipelago as a whole or of any one of its innumerable islands.
Those who go to the Archipelago to administer it get their via the training schools of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Those who go there to be guards are conscripted via the military conscription centers.
And those who, like you and me, dear reader, go there to die, must get there solely and compulsorily via arrest.
Aleksander I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 1973. trans. Thomas P. Whitney
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Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War offered a prospect of utter misery and desolation. Photographs and documentary films of the time show pitiful streams of helpless citizens trekking through a blasted landscape of broken cities and barren fields. Orphaned children wander forlornly past groups of worn out women picking over heaps of masonry. Shaven-headed deportees and concentration camp inmates in striped pyjamas stare listlessly at the camera, starving and diseased. Even the trains, propelled uncertainly along damaged tracks by intermittently available electric current, appear shell-shocked. Everyone and everything — with the notable exception of the well-fed Allied troops — seems worn out, without resources, exhausted.
Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. 2005.
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Klingon speakers, those who have devoted themselves to the study of a language invented for the Star Trek franchise, inhabit the lowest possible rung on the geek ladder. Dungeons and Dragons players, ham radio operators, robot engineers, computer programmers, comic book collectors — they all look down on Klingon speakers. Even the most ardent Star Trek fans, the Trekkies, who dress up in costume every day, who can recite entire scripts from memory, who collect Star Trek paraphernalia with mad devotion, consider Klingon speakers beneath them. When a discussion of Klingon appeared on Slashdot.org — the web site billed as "News for Nerds" — the topic inspired comments like, "I'm sorry, but it's people like this that give science fiction a bad name." Another said that Klingon speakers "provide excellent reason for forced sterilization. Then again being able to speak Klingon pretty much does this without surgery."
Arika Okrent, In the Land of Invented Languages, 2009.
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The night clouds were closing in on the salt licks east of the oxbow lakes along the folds in the earth beyond the Yalobusha River. The cotton was at last cleared from the field. Ida Mae tried now to get the children ready and to gather the cloths and quilts and somehow keep her mind off the churning within her. She had sold off the turkeys and doled out in secret the old stools, the wash pots, the tin tub, the bed pallets. Her husband was settling with Mr. Edd over the worth of a year's labor, and she did not know what would come of it. None of them had been on a train before — not unless you counted the clattering local from Bacon Switch to Okolona, where "by the time you sit down, you there" as Ida Mae put it. None of them had been out of Mississippi. Or Chickasaw County, for that matter.
There was no explaining to little James and Velma the stuffed bags and chaos and all that was atstake or why they had to put on their shoes and not cry and bring undue attention from anyone who might happen to see them leaving. Things had to look normal, like any other time they might ride into town, which was rare enough to begin with.
Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic story of America's Great Migration, 2010.
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The Ancient Babylonians called her Ishtar, to the Greeks she was Aphrodite and to the Romans Venus — goddess of love, fertility, and beauty. She is the brightest star in the night sky and visible even on a clear day. Some saw her as the harbinger of morning and evening, of new seasons or portentious times. She reigns as the `Morning Star' or the `Bringer of Light' for 260 days, and then disappears to rise again as the `Evening Star' and the `Bringer of Dawn'.
Venus has inspired people for centuries, but in the 1760s astronomers belived that the planet held the answer to one of the biggest questions in science — she was the key to understanding the size of the solar system.
In 1716 British astronomer Edmund Halley published a ten-page essay which called upon scientists to unite in a project spanning the entire globe — one that would change the world of science forever. On 6 June 1761, Halley predicted, Venus would traverse the face of the sun — for a few hours the bright star would appear as a perfectly black circle. He believed that measuring the exact time and duration of this rare celestial encounter would provide the data that astronomers needed in order to calculate the distance between the earth and the sun.
Andrea Wulf, Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens. 2012
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In 1881, the Iraqi-born archaeologist Hormuzd Rassam discovered a small fragment of a 2,500-year-old cuneiform clay tablet in the ruins of the ancient Babylonian city of Sippat, today known as Tell Abu Habbah, on the south-west outskirts of modern-day Baghdad. The taboe was just one of nearly 70,000 excavated by Rassam over a period of eighteen months and shipped back to the British Museum in London. Rassam's mission, inspired by a group of English Assyriologists who were struggling to decipher cuneiform script, was to discover a tablet which it was hoped would provide a historical account of the Biblical Flood. At first, the tablet was overlooked in favor of more impressive, complete examples. This was partly because Rassam, who could not read cuneiform, was unaware of its significance, which was appreciated only at the end of the nineteenth century when the script was successfully translated. Today, the tablet is on public display at the British Museum, labelled as "The Babylonian Map of the World." It is the first known map of the world.
Jerry Brotton, A History of the World in 12 Maps, 2012
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On a summer evening, a rustic "youth of barely eighteen years" arrived in a seaport capital, "the little metropolis of a New England colony." Although dressed in homespun and having little money, Robin was handsome, alert, and ambitious. The clever son of a country clergyman, he came to seek his celebrated kinsman, Major Molineux, a wealthy gentleman in royal favor. With the mayor's patronage, Robin expected to rise quickly n society. Passing through "a succession of crooked and narrow streets," he became confused and angry when no one would direct him to his kinsman's mansion. Instead people mocked Robin. At last a stranger replied, "Watch here an hour and Major Molineux will pass by." Robin noticed the stranger's face painted half black and half red. "as if two individual devils, a fiend of fire and a fiend of darkness, had united themselves to form this infernal visage."
Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History 1750-1804. 2016
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This is a short book about a vast topic. We are, all of us, everywhere, always, enmeshed in a web of rules that supports and constrains. Rules fix the beginning and end of the working day and the school ear, direct the ebb and flow of traffic on the roads, dictate who can be married to whom and how, situation the fork to the right or the left of the plate, score the runs and walks of baseball games, tame debate in meetings and parliaments, establish what can and cannot be taken on a plane as hand luggage, specify who can vote and when, parse the grammar of a sentence, channel customers into the proper lines at the grocery store, tell pet owners whether their animals are welcome or not, lay down the meter and rhyme scheme of a Patrarchan sonnet, and order the rites of birth and death. And these are just examples of explicit rules, the sort to be found written down on signs and in manuals, handbooks, sacred texts, and legal statutes. Add implicit rules, and the web becomes so densely woven that barely any human activity slips through the mesh: there are the unwritten rules about whether to greet with outstretched hand or two pecks on the cheek à la française (or one à la belge), how many miles per hour over the posted speed limit will be tolerated without incurring a traffic ticket, how much to tip at what kind of restaurant, when to raise (and lower) one's voice in conversation, who should open doors for whom, how often and how loudly an opera may be interrupted with cheers and boos, when to arrive at and when to leave a dinner party, and how long an epic should be. Cultures notoriously differ as to the content of their rules, but there is no culture without rules, lots of them. A book about all of these rules would be little short of a history of humanity.
Lorraine Daston, Rules: A Short History of What We Live By. 2022