Sidney

“There are three great taboos in textbook publishing,” an editor at one of the biggest houses told me, “sex, religion, and social class.” While I had been able to guess the first two, the third floored me. Sociologists know the importance of social class, after all. Reviewing American history textbooks convinced me that this editor was right, however. The notion that opportunity might be unequal in America, that not everyone has “the power to rise in the world,” is anathema to textbook authors, and to many teachers as well.”
― James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“least forty-three organized boy gangs treaded Richmond’s landscape, twelve of them from Southside (across the river at Manchester): Gamble’s Hill Cats, Grace Street Cats, Oregon Hill Cats (also Terribles), Sidney Cats, Harveytown Cats, First, Second, and Third Street Cats, Tenth Street Gang, Fourth Street Horribles, Fifth Street Gang, Shockoe Hill Gang, Butchertown Gang, Rocketts Gang, Church Hill Gang, Union Hill Gang, Old Market Gang, Gully Nation Gang, Sheep Hill Gang, Brook Road Gang, Hobo Gang, Lulu Gang, Clyde Row Gang, Park Sparrows Gang, Bumtown Gang, Basin Bank Cats, Twenty-Seventh Street Gang, Thirtieth Street Gang, Grace Street Gang, West End Gang, and Male Orphan Asylum Cats; from Manchester—Terrapin Hill Cats, Baconsville Cats, Goat Hill Cats, Battery Cats, Diamond Hill Cats, Swampoodle Cats, Hull Street Cats, Decatur Street Cats, Oak Grove Cats, Marx’s Field Cats, Belle Isle Cats, and Swansboro Gang.”
― Harry M. Ward, Children of the Streets of Richmond, 1865-1920

“I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick: or, the White Whale

“If obesity were an infectious disease, the team’s data suggested “the outbreak” would have begun in Greene County, Alabama.”
― David DeRose, Thirty Days to Natural Blood Pressure Control: The “No Pressure” Solution