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Educated
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what a person knows about the past is limited, and will always be limited, to what they are told by others.
“For the pedant, dates are deities, worthy of worship, but for the true social historian, they are minutiae only, a shorthand, convenient reminders and no more. You do not ask a Titanic survivor, ‘Let me see now, just exactly when was that?’ You ask him this: ‘What was it like? How did you feel?’ And that is the job of the social historian: to make the past vibrant for the present; to emotionally involve those of us who were not there. And to make us understand.”
― Marathon Man
― Marathon Man
“Between the Stamp Act of 1765 and Lexington a decade later, one of the colonists’ most widespread tools of resistance against arbitrary taxation without representation was boycotting British imports, particularly luxury items. While the melodrama of hucking crates of tea into Boston Harbor continues to inspire civic-minded hotheads to this day, it’s worth remembering the hordes of stoic colonial women who simply swore off tea and steeped basil leaves in boiling water to make the same point. What’s more valiant: littering from a wharf or years of doing chores and looking after”
― Lafayette in the Somewhat United States
― Lafayette in the Somewhat United States
“Will it ever be perfect?” I wondered. “No,” he told me with a smile. “Nothing in life is. But, my dear mademoiselle, life is not about achievement. It is about the effort. If one takes pleasure in every step, one enjoys the whole journey.”
― A Treacherous Curse
― A Treacherous Curse
“what they had written was not absolute but was the result of a biased process of conversation and revision,”
― Educated
― Educated
“It was no wonder, then, that Dumas lost his temper when he read the official report of the battle, compiled by Napoleon’s aide-de-camp General Berthier, and saw that his role had been diminished to one of “in observation at San Antonio.” Berthier did include a phrase about Dumas’s fighting the enemy “well,” but this did nothing to make Alex Dumas reconsider what he was about to write into the official military record of the Army of Italy. Dumas picked up his quill and wrote to Napoleon a letter of such fantastical insolence it would be cited in every historical account of him as an example of his legendary temper: January 18, 1797 GENERAL, I have learned that the jack ass whose business it is to report to you upon the battle of the 27th [the 27 Nivôse, i.e., January 16] stated that I stayed in observation throughout that battle. I don’t wish any such observation on him, since he would have shit in his pants. Salute and Brotherhood! ALEX. DUMAS”
― The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo
― The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo
Natalie’s 2025 Year in Books
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