Mark

“Our national problem has not been ignoring the Civil War, but turning it into a kind of theme park in which nostalgia and mendacity have eclipsed the raw and unpleasant truth that one army fought, and lost, a battle for the liberty to enslave other human beings, while the other, full of imperfect men fighting for a variety of motives, secured the emancipation of those human beings and thereby preserved a political experiment underwritten by the idea of equality.”
― Elizabeth D. Samet, Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness

“[Warren] Harding diligently worked the knots of America's body politic from the moment he took office, soothing conservatives by resizing the federal government for peacetime and adopting a pro-business outlook, soothing his Republican base by raising tariffs and lowering taxes, soothing the left by releasing from prison the socialist icon Eugene Debs and other radicals rounded up during Palmer's Red Scare, soothing the battered farm belt with an emergency tariff and federal protection for farm cooperatives, soothing labor with public works programs to ease unemployment and by cajoling the steel industry into abandoning its inhumane practice of twelve-hour shifts. Harding soothed the isolationist and nativist majority in America with tighter immigration policies and a foreign policy emphasizing legitimate national interests over crusading idealism. He soothed international tensions by normalizing relations with Germany and other former enemy states, and by convincing the world's leading naval powers to reduce tonnage at his Washington Disarmament Conference, the first gathering of its kind and a remarkable, unexpected success.”
― Kenneth Whyte, Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times

“When the cry for 'a return to gold' goes up, as it sometimes does in the United States, it usually comes from folk who know little about the history of the subject.”
― Ian M. Drummond, The Gold Standard and the International Monetary System, 1900-1939

“Henry I was not an administrator or a social engineer. He was an extremely able ruler who understood the art of propaganda. of playing the waiting game, and of manipulating the hopes and fears of men. His nature was calculating, determined, even ruthless; he loved material possessions and was self-evidently a man of strong sexual appetites. Yet there was more to Henry than political cunning: this was a man who, if feared by some, could win and keep the loyalty of others. He possessed a clear sense of what it was to rule England and Normandy, and took his role as protector of the church in his realms very seriously. The churchmen who knew him, such as Peter the Venerable and Archbishop Hugh, and those who wrote about him, like Orderic Vitalis, recognized that in an imperfect world, peace and security in England and Normandy had come to rest on his shoulders.”
― Judith A. Green, Henry I: King of England and Duke of Normandy