James Henry Breasted Quotes
But it is obvious that our fathers, whose efforts have planted these great and prosperous cities along the once lonely trails of our own broad land, received all the fundamentals of civilization as a heritage from their European ancestors.
Breasted, James Henry. The Conquest of Civilization. Harper & Brothers, 1926, p. 13.
He was part of the Congressional Delegation that had been appointed to welcome the newly elected first President George Washington to New York City, then the first capitol of the nation. The delegation met Washington on the New Jersey shore of the Hudson River and escorted him with a large flotilla of official and unofficial boats across the Hudson River to the Manhattan shoreline where this huge crowd had gathered. The tremendous crowd worried some of the Congress who thought there might be too much respect and obedience to the President—that he might be viewed as a monarch or worse, view himself as one. The authority and respect paid to the president was in political dispute for the first three presidential terms until Thomas Jefferson defeated John Adams and the Federalists.
Commenting in the Senate in 1952 on the use of the cross in Dwight Eisenhower's anti-Communist "crusade" that resulted in the words "under God" inserted in the Pledge of Allegiance:
The major motivation of the French for their many voyages to North America was to find a Northwest Passage to the Orient. Settlement came as an afterthought, and even then to develop a base in Canada for future exploration.
The line, like many in good poetry, has several levels of meaning. The most obvious is that we had explored and conquered the land, before we became a nation.
One thing that made this a very unusual declaration was that in 1381 an act (see {616281}) was passed in England which prohibited anyone from leaving the country without the express permission of the monarch. In this case she gave Gilbert the right to take any Englishman who wanted to go. With all the rights of Englishmen from Magna Carta on down, the right of emigration did not appear until modern times.
The Irish Earls of Ulster, after a failed rebellion against English rule, fled to the European continent. As Chichester realized, this created an opportunity for the King to name new Earls and grant them the lands and possessions of the Earls who had fled. And since the Irish people were loyal to their traditional Earls. He suggested that English and Scots colonists be recruited to settle the lands. The King agreed and referred to the project as the “Ulster Plantation”. This was the reason that Northern Ireland had a much larger Protestant population percentage than the rest of Ireland and wanted to remain part of England when Ireland obtained its independence.
He was agreeing with the Right Wing racist Dutch politician Geert Wilders that one of the dangers of immigration of different races and ethnicities is that their children would not be capable or able to contribute to America or in his view make America Great Again as it has been diminished by all these immiogrant babies of the last few generations. There are very few areas of civilization where America is not greater today than ever before.
James Henry Breasted was an American archaeologist, Egyptologist, and historian. After completing his PhD at the University of Berlin in 1894, he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago. In 1901 he became director of the Haskell Oriental Museum at the university, where he continued to concentrate on Egypt. In 1905 Breasted was promoted to full professor, and held the first chair in Egyptology and Oriental History in the United States.
