'American Sniper' is a film that erases history, spectacularizes violence, and reduces war and its aftermath to cheap entertainment, with an underexplained referent to the mental problems many vets live with when they return home from the war.
Finland had a civil war less than 100 years ago, just like in Ireland. If you look at the history of newly independent nations, civil war is almost every time present, even in the United States.
The most frightening pages of history are those which reveal how easily conditions making a desert of the human spirit may come into existence, with the oozings away of incentive and kindliness in our natural social structure.
I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical t...
For most of American history, of course, the important religious divides were between denominations - not just between Protestants and Catholics and Jews but between Lutherans and Episcopalians and Southern Baptists and the other endlessly fine-tuned...
If you go to Africa and you're white, you're probably not going to get that much work either. But the fact is that there is a longer history of black integration in the U.S. I don't have any resentment about this: I did the maths, calculated it again...
I grew up in the 1960s in Memphis, and my father was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union. I was born three years before Martin Luther King was killed, and I think that history of civil action was something that I had in my blood.
When I'm not writing, I read loads of fiction, but I've been writing quite constantly lately so I've been reading a lot of nonfiction - philosophy, religion, science, history, social or cultural studies.
I found that looking at the Israeli/Palestinian conflict from an outside vantage point was actually quite distancing. The history of the conflict, the personalities, the violence, the distrust, and the seeming lack of viable solutions made meaningful...
One of the consequences of the Iranian revolution has been an explosion of history. A country once known only from British consular reports and intrepid travelogues is now awash with historical documents, letters, diaries, grainy video, weblogs and s...
I've got a lot of shows under my belt that are ancient history solely because they were on the air before this video revolution came along and ensured that canceled shows could continue to have a bit of a presence.
History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose.
The southward advance of native African farmers with Central African crops halted in Natal, beyond which Central African crops couldn't grow - with enormous consequences for the recent history of South Africa.
It's been a strange day - a day when I thought I was on top of the world, planning my life. I planned all of my courses for the rest of the semester at Smith, and talked to my advisor about honoring in History.
Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral. Its transmission today is still in part oral, because we become acquainted with poetry through nursery rhymes, which we hear before we can read.
Jews have a special relationship to books, and the Haggadah has been translated more widely, and reprinted more often, than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy, not a prayer book, user's manual, timeline, poem or palimpse...
For a brief time in the 1850s, the telegraph companies of England and the United States thought that they could (and should) preserve every message that passed through their wires. Millions of telegrams - in fireproof safes. Imagine the possibilities...
The Internet makes it possible for people like me to live the way I do now. Without it, I'd have to be in New York or some other city. I think the Internet is the greatest invention in history after antibiotics.
As you grow older and young people come up to you with their history books, you realize that some of the things I have been able to do have been impactful. But for me, I try to keep everything in perspective and stay humble.
Personally, I can't see the appeal in trekking down to D.C. for a networking extravaganza, even if it is built around a special moment in American history. While I find the election of Barack Obama inspirational, I don't have a desire to memorialize ...
I walked out of Spielberg's 'Lincoln' having such a thirst for more. It used such a microscopic albeit enormous event in American history. It used such a small piece of his presidency to illustrate him as a president through the lens of that event.
