Jurnee Smollett Quotes

I just love the days when you come out of the archives with half a dozen excellent descriptions or poignant accounts of personal experiences.

I'd done a lot of research in Hollywood and in academia. I love research and so I wanted to kind of ground the book in history, in things that I read that were universal and timeless and then kind of let my own experiences sort of filter through all of this history.

Everybody has told the story of black people in struggle except black people. The black people in the struggle haven't had the means to tell the story historically. There were a million slaves, but you see very few slave narratives. And that is intentional.

Jeremy Popkin's collection of first-person narratives of the Haitian Revolution is an extremely valuable work, accessible, sound and intelligent. I only wish such a book had been available fifteen years ago when I was in the early stages of researching my series of novels. Popkin has been deft and tactful in stitching together these excerpts, and as a result, he manages to tell a complete version of the Revolution almost entirely in the words of the people who experienced it-this book engaged me deeply.

Inspired by Alex Haley's 'Roots,' at the age of 11 I began a handwritten Middle Passage story called 'Lawdy, Lawdy, Make Us Free.' I was raised by civil rights activists with a very strong sense of racial history and consciousness.

I conduct very few interviews with veterans. The contemporaneous, or near-contemporaneous, record for WWII is so spectacularly deep that latter-day recollections are largely unnecessary for a historian. Of course, in considering any account, I'm looking for additional sources that can confirm or enlarge that version of events.

I started reading the big histories and the small histories, the memoirs and so forth. At some point, I found the diary of William E. Dodd.

As an author of narrative history, I read a lot of history books.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: 'I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.'

I like reading about the past. I'm definitely not a history buff, but I do read a bit of history now and again, and to do that for work is really exciting.

Women were once considered chattel, and slavery was regarded as sanctioned in the Bible. However, western society grew to recognize that neither was just.

For 'Seabiscuit', I interviewed 100 people I never met.

The white man made the mistake of letting me read his history books. He made the mistake of teaching me that Patrick Henry was a patriot and George Washington - wasn't nothing non-violent about old Pat or George Washington.

The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waved Bibles over their heads in the Civil War and justified it.

My process for determining which eras I'd write about was to just read history books that gave a really broad overview of Chinese history. And when I came across a historical figure or a historical incident that was especially interesting to me, ideas for characters and stories would surface.

I can speak of slavery only so far as it came under my own observation - only so far as I have known and experienced it in my own person.

My favorite literature to read is fairly dry history. I like the framework, and my imagination can do the rest.

A poem I write is not just about me; it is about national identity, not just regional but national, the history of people in relation to other people. I reach for these outward stories to make sense of my own life, and how my story intersects with a larger public history.

Several hundred years ago, the only thing that slave families had was cooking and their family meals.

Prior to the Revolution, the great majority, or rather the great body of our people had been so long accustomed to the practice and convenience of having slaves, that very few among them ever doubted the propriety and rectitude of it.

Slavery was a faith-based institution. It was supported by the churches and their ministers who provided a religious and moral justification of the institution.

Whenever I hear any one, arguing for slavery I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

There are no class of people in the United States who so highly appreciate the legality of marriage as those persons who have been held and treated as property.

I can recollect no one place at present from whence the cotton can come, but from the labour of the slaves

… moral ideas are not fixed. The attitude of public opinion towards slavery was completely changed in twenty or thirty years.