Historical Oversight Quotes

Anyone can tell you that how you're raised as a child has a great deal to do with how you behave as an adult and whether you have complexes or whether you need to prove yourself or all that kind of stuff and yet the mother in a traditional family who has raised a child never makes it in the history books.

Private grudges give rise to public measures. [Such matters] lie beneath the reach of ordinary historians.

What a pity, when Christopher Columbus discovered America, that he ever mentioned it.

Generations of devoted American history buffs have spent countless hours reading and writing long books about the American Revolution without ever having come across the name of Dr. Thomas Young. Yet it was Young who came up with the idea for the original tea party - the one in Boston Harbor.

It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone, or any other Important thing--and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others.

The history of other cultures is non-existent until it erupts in confrontation with the United States.

Think of all that hard work our founding fathers put in - the revolutionizing, the three-fifths compromising, having to write the entire Constitution with a quill - and yet they neglected to include the right to vote.

As you go down the rabbit hole of reading into our history, you realize that there are so many things that history books didn't teach us about ourselves.

I thought I knew who Alan Turing was. I've always loved history, and I was actually shocked by how little I actually knew. I was amazed this wasn't common knowledge. Why wasn't he on the front covers of my history books? He's one of the great thinkers of the last century, and he was sort of pushed into the shadows.

Historians still often see the end of the war as meaning nothing more for Germany than lost territories, lost participation in colonization, and lost assets for the state and individuals. They frequently overlook the most serious loss that Germany suffered.

When reading about what may be described as the lesser celebrated heroic figures of the Harlem Renaissance, we rarely get a definitive look at just how complicated and sometimes dangerous their everyday lives were. In fact, until the past ten years, many defined the period primarily by its well-known literary, musical, and artistic elements while overlooking the fact there was any political component to it at all.

One thing that always frustrated me was that, while Benjamin Franklin's was the best-known face of the eighteenth century, no one ever took his sister's likeness.

The truth has never been told about women in history: that everywhere man has gone woman has gone too, and what he has done she has done also. Women are ignorant of their own past and ignorant of their own importance in that past.

I went to jail 44 times. I've been beaten and left for dead on the side of the road fighting for freedom... Yet Rosa Parks is better known in history than Ralph David Abernathy. Why is that?

We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent. We humans are not just a superficial race - we are a very unfair one.

Most historians and other writers of what we now consider 'primary sources' simply didn't think about women and their contribution to society. They took it for granted, except when that contribution or its lack directly affected men.

Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.

So many people of color who made major contributions to American history have been trapped in the purgatory of history.

It is possible, reading standard histories, to forget half the population of the country. The explorers were men, the landholders and merchants men, the political leaders men, the military figures men. The very invisibility of women, the overlooking of women, is a sign of their submerged status.

I was shocked when I would read a newspaper from that time, and the Freedom March wasn't even mentioned.

We now have no record of these famous stage plays, so it turned out to be very narrow-minded thinking.