Oscar Handlin > Quotes

“The historian, predisposed to verbal evidence, who reads about rather than looks at objects, becomes dependent upon secondhand impressions and is helpless when critics disagree or interpose their own extraneous judgments between the work and the viewer.”
― Oscar Handlin, Truth in History

“The condition of man is to till the soil; there is no other wholeness to his existence.”
― Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People

“In America a bread never came without complications.”
― Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People

“Poverty was a dog whose teeth sank deep.”
― Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People

“They would say then, if they considered it in looking backward, that the village was so much of their lives because the village was a whole.”
― Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People

“Painfully, because ancestral wisdom was sadly inadequate to the needs of this soil which, on approach, also revealed itself strange. Application of well-tried ways was here not enough. The peasant had constantly to consider his steps, to make decisions in matters that had passed without thought in the Old World—what to plant, and when, and how much, and where. To shoulder this burden of choices, the individual had not now the support of a village council. He acted alone. He had not long before the difficulties were apparent. He found little on his American farm that was familiar.”
― Oscar Handlin, Children of the Uprooted

“Stability, the deep, cushiony ability to take blows, and yet to keep things as they were, came from the special place of these people on the land. The peasants were agriculturalists; their livelihood sprang from the earth. Americans they met later would have called them "farmers", but that word had a different meaning in Europe. The bonds that held these men to their acres were not simply the personal ones of the husbandman who temporarily mixes his sweat with the soil. The ties were deeper, more intimate. For the peasant was part of a community and the community was held to the land as a whole.”
― Oscar Handlin , Children of the Uprooted