American History Quotes

“In a shipboard lecture en route to America, John Winthrop, Massachusetts’ first governor, called the soon-to-be-founded settlement “a city on a hill,” a model of God’s ultimate plan for humanity. Elaborated by a succession of ministers, this sense of divine purpose arose from a particular reading of sacred history: God had chosen the Puritans to create in America a New Zion, as He had once chosen the Jews in ancient times. Sometimes reformulated in secular language, this deep-seated belief in America’s unique role in history would long survive.”
― Paul S. Boyer, American History: A Very Short Introduction

“By 1800 the U.S. Indian population stood at about 600,000, a pathetic remnant of the estimated 2.2 million on the eve of European colonization.”
― Paul S. Boyer, American History: A Very Short Introduction

“Christopher Columbus himself established the template for the newcomers’ view of the aboriginal population. “They ought to make good and skilled servants,” he wrote; “I think they can very easily be made Christians. … I could conquer the whole of them with 50 men, and govern them as I please.”
― Paul S. Boyer, American History: A Very Short Introduction

“In a 1604 pamphlet James I had denounced tobacco as “loathsome to the eye, hateful to the Nose, harmfull to the braine, [and] dangerous to the Lungs,” but to little effect.”
― Paul S. Boyer, American History: A Very Short Introduction

“By 1500, the North American population comprised an estimated seven to ten million people.”
― Paul S. Boyer, American History: A Very Short Introduction

“Contemporary Americans, immersed in the busy rhythms of twenty-first-century life, rarely pause to reflect that they dwell in a land that has been inhabited for millennia. Human settlement on the continent we call North America (after the Florentine cartographer Amerigo Vespucci) began at least 15,000 years ago,”
― Paul S. Boyer, American History: A Very Short Introduction

“as tidal waves of immigrants poured into the United States, many carried in their mental baggage fond images of the promise of their future homeland, symbolized by the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor. The 1883 poem by Emma Lazarus that is inscribed on its base ends: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, Yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
― Paul S. Boyer, American History: A Very Short Introduction