Coach Ray

Text: The American Past

A Survey of American History Volume I: to 1877
9th Edition
Joseph Conlin

"Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history...Nor personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us.  The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honour or dishonour to the last generation."

-Abraham Lincoln, December, 1862

"Four Score and seven years ago our forefathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal"

-Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863

"The lessons of history are lessons of appreciation.  Everything we have, all our great institutions, our lives, our music, art and poetry, our freedoms, everything is because somebody went before us and did the hard work, provided the creative energy, faced the storms, made the sacrifices and kept the faith.

Indifference to history isn't just ignorant; it's a form of ingratitude.  And the scale of our ignorance seems especially shameful in the face of our unprecedented good fortune."

- David McCullough, Historian

"A nation which does not remember what it was yesterday does not know what it is today.  We are trying to do a futile thing if we do not know where we came from or what we have been about."

-Woodrow Wilson, 28th President

"Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtile; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend."

- Francis Bacon, Of Studies, 1625