Michael Matteson

“others do nothing but. This book is neither kind. The truths on which the nation was founded are not mysteries, articles of faith, never to be questioned, as if the founding were an act of God, but neither are they lies, all facts fictions, as if nothing can be known, in a world without truth. Between reverence and worship, on the one side, and irreverence and contempt, on the other, lies an uneasy path, away from false pieties and petty triumphs over people who lived and died and committed both their acts of courage and their sins and errors long before we committed ours. “We cannot hallow this ground,” Lincoln said at Gettysburg. We are obliged, instead, to walk this ground, dedicating ourselves to both the living and the dead. A”
― Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States

“States’ Rights Democratic Party and ran a candidate to Truman’s right. They held a nominating convention in Birmingham during which Frank M. Dixon, a former governor of Alabama, said that Truman’s civil rights programs would “reduce us to the status of a mongrel, inferior race, mixed in blood, our Anglo-Saxon heritage a mockery.” The Dixiecrat platform rested on this statement: “We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race.” As its candidate, the States’ Rights Party nominated South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond.45”
― Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States

“That afternoon, King telegraphed Kennedy that “the Negro’s endurance may be at the breaking point.” Kennedy, who had been deliberating for months, went to Congress to meet with House members. He decided the time had come to speak to the public. On television that night, he addressed the nation: “If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public; if he cannot send his children to the best public school available; if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him; if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?”
― Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States

“I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense,” Thomas Paine, the spitfire son of an English grocer, wrote in Common Sense, in 1776. Kings have no right to reign, Paine argued, because, if we could trace hereditary monarchy back to its beginnings—“could we take off the dark covering of antiquity, and trace them to their first rise”—we’d find “the first of them nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang.”
― Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States