Babbage had most of this system sketched out by 1837, but the first true computer to use this programmable architecture didn't appear for more than a hundred years.

All the cartoonists at heart liked him, and there was seldom or never anything bitter or really unfriendly in their portrayals of him; they were uniformly good-natured. Caricatures even transformed...

"The crimes of the Germans are really the most abominable ever to be recorded in the history of the so-called civilized nations," he wrote the physicist Otto Hahn. "The conduct of the German...

We are the people of Misr, the old woman rasped. Since our Sunni ancestors fled from Nilotic al-Ourouba, we have known flight and death. The young go on that our people shall not die.

Letter writing is a truly anachronistic genre, a sort of tardy inheritance of the eighteenth century; those who lived at that time believed in the pure truth of the written word. And we? Times have...

The Anasazi did manage to construct in stone the largest and tallest buildings erected in North America until the Chicago steel girder skyscrapers of the 1880s.

Abraham Lincoln struck off the chains of black Americans, but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy's sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever...

Brave young American men climbed the rugged slopes of Korean mountains and fought in homesickness and desperate weariness for the sake of a people strange to them and for reasons they scarcely...

Certainly, nobody imagined that Mr. Lincoln would order an armed invasion over the affair. When he did exactly that, the entire South exploded with defiance and patriotism, cheering the new...

This process, one of trading the state to outside owners in exchange for their now seemingly entirely temporary agreement to enrich us, in other words the pauperization of California, had in fact...

On coming out of the chapel, a well can be seen on the left. There are two in this yard. You ask, Why is there no bucket and no pulley to this one? Because no water is drawn from it now. Why is no...

History existed to be retold, with more panache but not necessarily greater accuracy.

A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.

I dont believe knowing can save us. What isconstant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God-who knows all that can be known-seems powerless to change.

If you help load a cart you get a ride in it, as often as not. It gives him to think, how bad people are at loading carts. Men trying to walk straight ahead through a narrow gateway with a wide wooden...

The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn't absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that...

He had no ideal world of dead heroes; he knew little of the life of men in the past; he must find the beings to whom he could cling with loving admiration among those who came within speech of him.

Rome tolerated every abominable practice, embraced every foul idea in the name of freedom and the rights of the common man. Citizens no longer carried on deviant behavior in private, but pridefully...

He sat there all through a history lesson about the Roman Empire, which--having lived in the Roman Empire, for the four hundred years during which it had included the British Isles--he found...

For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our...

My mother, who would always buy her books new, hated it the vintage hardcovers with their cracked spines and threadbare cloth covers. True you couldn't go in there and buy the latest best seller, but...

For me, a journey to Damascus is an amazing hunt from beginning to end, a slice through layers of history in search of treasure.

Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to...

This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: 'At the time, no one knew what was coming.

Arthur managed to speak to his grandmother {Queen Eleanor of England}, demanding that she evacuate the castle with all her possessions and then go peaceably wherever she wished, for he wanted to show...

They inhabited a lost world of splendour and brutality, a world dominated by religious change, in which there were few saints.

At a time when history made its way slowly, the few events were easily remembered and woven into a backdrop, known to everyone, before which private life unfolded the gripping show of its adventures....

The first step in liquidating a people,' said Hubl, 'is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new...

Perhaps this is how it is--life flowing smoothly over memory and history, the past returning or not, depending on the tide. History is a collection of found objects washed up through time. Goods,...

I went to my grandmother, your great-great-grandmother, and asked her to write a letter. She was my mother's mother. Your father's mother's mother's mother. I hardly knew her. I didn't have any...