Natalie Coffman

“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.”
― William Goldman, Marathon Man

“what they had written was not absolute but was the result of a biased process of conversation and revision,”
― Tara Westover, 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”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

“While Americans view the Revolutionary War as a conflict fought from Maine to Florida, France actually forced Britain to fight the Revolution as a world war, defending its outposts in India, Jamaica, and Africa. The British had to divert most of their celebrated navy from the American coast to defend against French attacks elsewhere.‡”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo