The study of history reveals that human progress has not been continuous and regular, but intermittent and spasmodic, often depending upon apparently accidental causes. It is difficult to get a cross-section view of society at any given stage.
Interpretation
Human progress is uneven and often influenced by random events rather than a steady trajectory.
Charles A. Beard's quote highlights the complexity of human progress throughout history, emphasizing how it is not a smooth or predictable journey. Instead, it is characterized by periods of advancement interspersed with setbacks, often influenced by unforeseen circumstances. This perspective encourages a nuanced understanding of history and society, recognizing that multiple factors, including chance events, have shaped our progression over time.
In practice
During a lecture on the unpredictability of social change.
The functions of the president are prescribed by the Constitution, but his real achievements are not set by the letter of the law. They are determined rather by his personality, the weight of his influence, his capacity for managing men, and the strength and effectiveness of the party forces behind him.
All the lessons of history in four sentences: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power. The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs. When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
American government did not originate in any abstract theories about liberty and equality, but in the actual experience gained by generation after generation of English colonists in managing their own political affairs. The Revolution did not make a breach in the continuity of their institutional life.
Education from the lowest to the highest form must have for its object the training of the individual so that, in seeking the fullest satisfaction of his own nature, he will harmoniously perform his function as a member of a corporate society.
She was not a white woman. She was not a Greek... Until the emergence of the doctrine of white superiority, Cleopatra was generally pictured as a distinctly African woman, dark in color.
A generation without history is a generation that not only loses a nation's memory but loses a sense of what it's like to be inside a human skin.
I've met many Holocaust survivors who find the era infinitely compelling because they have this deep hunger to understand how it all could possibly have happened.
Let's face it - think of Africa, and the first images that come to mind are of war, poverty, famine and flies. How many of us really know anything at all about the truly great ancient African civilizations, which in their day, were just as splendid and glorious as any on the face of the earth?
It is important to understand the continuing, confused fascination with the Second World War. For most of us, the great unspoken question is how would we have behaved in the face of danger and when forced to make major moral choices.
Blacks have experienced a history of victimization in America, beginning obviously in slavery and then another 100 years of segregation. I grew up in segregation. I know very well what it was about and all of the difficulties it placed on black life, and how we were truly held down before the civil-rights movement.
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