Coming into repeated contact with the same few others does not have the same consequences as meeting new people, either for human culture or for culturing microbes.

Memory says, “I did that.” Pride replies, “I could not have done that.” Eventually, memory yields. – FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE3.

It is not too much to say that the blacks in Georgia and the Carolinas made Sherman’s march possible. Their help meant that Sherman’s forces would not be traveling through hostile territory without supply lines. Rather, the soldiers were more like a huge guerilla force in friendly territory.

Could it be that we don’t want to think badly of Woodrow Wilson? We seem to feel that a person like Helen Keller can be an inspiration only so long as she remains uncontroversial, one-dimensional. We don’t want complicated icons. “People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions,” Helen Keller pointed out. “Conclusions are not always pleasant.”41 Most of us automatically shy away from conflict, and understandably so. We particularly seek to avoid conflict in the classroom.

Between 1950 and 1970, the suburban population doubled from 36 million to 74 million as 83% of the nation’s population growth took place in the suburbs.

Since the alternatives to war remain roads largely not taken in the United States, however, they are tricky subjects for historians. As Edward Carr notes, “History is, by and large, a record of what people did, not what people failed to do.” On the other hand, making the present seem inevitable robs history of all its life and much of its meaning. History is contingent on the actions of people.

The history of a nation is, unfortunately, too easily written as the history of its dominant class. – KWAME NKRUMAH.

Indian history is the antidote to the pious ethnocentrism of American exceptionalism, the notion that European Americans are God’s chosen people. Indian history reveals that the United States and its predecessor British colonies have wrought great harm in the world. We must not forget this – not to wallow in our wrongdoing, but to understand and to learn, that we might not wreak harm again.

Such titles differ from the titles of all other textbooks students read in high school or college. Chemistry books, for example, are called Chemistry or Principles of Chemistry, not Triumph of the Molecule.

Americans need to learn from the Wilson era, that there is a connection between racist presidential leadership and like-minded public response.