Barbara Adde’s Reviews > History Matters > Status Update

“As a writer, I’m interested in the creative drive, the continuity of a civilization, the connection between one generation and the next…. How does one generation break away from the preceding one, and what does it gain or lose by doing so?”

“Like a lot of people, I had been told as a youngster, ‘You’re good at English and history; best stay away from science and math.’ I had no mathematics beyond algebra, no science courses except for geology. The Roebling papers were a great lesson because I found not only that I could handle technical material, but that it was extremely interesting.”

“In EM Forster’s ‘Aspects of the Novel,’ he talks about the difference between a sequence of events and a story. He says, If I tell you that the king died and then the queen died, that’s a sequence of events. If I tell you that the king died and then the queen died of grief, that’s a story - you feel that.”

“All great civilizations have had at least two things in common: confidence and a sense of continuity. And we gain both from our sense of the past. We are confident because we know who we are. We know what we have done. We know we have been there before.”

“The marvelous thing about the past is whenever you reach down into it, all you find is life. You could even argue that there is no such thing as the past. There was only somebody else’s present.”

“Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude. I TD a form of ingratitude.”