Social History Quotes

History is not the past. History is the present. We carry our history with us.

The business of return migration is a phenomenon that historians have indeed begun to look at, but it is rather an ignored and underplayed story and one that we need to know more about.

Jazz, and the history of jazz, is the history of America.

Every historical moment needs the stories to be told about it.

History is the memory of a nation

It is the idea of 'People' to treat its material as if it were history and, what is more, as if it were the history of a happy period.

There has been a tendency only to deal with a certain social class when it comes to stories more than 100 years ago.

My ancestors fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War; I was raised in Natchez, Miss.; I performed in the Confederate Pageant for a decade; I dug ditches and loaded trucks with black men who taught me more than any book ever could; and I graduated from Ole Miss. Anyone who survived that is a de facto expert on the South.

I was interested in what was really going on in Salem at that time, and I resolved to investigate this seemingly unorthodox treatment of the people and the period.

The Bible, for all its riches, is not a document of social history.

If the ideas of any particular man are determined by his environment, then the ideas of humanity, in their historical development, are determined by the development of the social environment, by the history of social relationships.

If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.

In 1975, which was the height of the women's movement, I thought I'd write a book on women's history. But in searching for a topic, I realized that there were few places in history where men and women interacted. Finally, it hit me: 'Oh, look at the family. That's the one place.'

American myths have never been colorless.

Crime fiction is the fiction of social history. Societies get the crimes they deserve.

I am fascinated by history and particularly the Victorian era.

History is formed by the people, those who have power and those without power. Each one of us makes history.

Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.

In a certain way, novelists become unacknowledged historians, because we talk about small, tiny, little anonymous moments that won't necessarily make it into the history books.

History, well taught, is the demythologising of the past... Take any important issue of our time - Northern Ireland, Nuclear Disarmament, Race, The Welfare State, South Africa - and it becomes impossible to seriously confront any of them without understanding their historical background.

Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.

I saw 'Billy Elliot' again, and what I loved about it was the way it had become a social document, a reminder of what happened with the mining communities in the '80s. And I thought, 'Everyone keeps wanting me to make a sequel to 'Beckham,' but maybe a musical remake is the answer, embracing all this theatricality.'

I was born in Glasgow. But my family is pretty much from a little town called Paisley, famous for its cotton mills and paisley pattern.

Emigration is the great fact of Irish social history.

By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one....