1900 was a bit of mixed bag, it seems to me, on the one hand, because this is the year when this country becomes the premiere producer of manufactured goods. Clearly, a lot of people were making a lot of money, but it’s also a time that reflects the savaging of one of the deepest depressions. David Levering Lewis Read Quote
A preoccupation with theory has been a defensive response by academic biographers in this country, I submit, to the condescension of traditional humanists and social scientists pervading higher education for many years. David Levering Lewis Read Quote
I came into my teens unaware that most Americans, blacks as well as whites, were ignorant of the main facts of Negro history. And so it was the facts of other histories that I found most intriguing. I fell into a U.S. history major by chance late in my second year at Fisk University. David Levering Lewis Read Quote
I felt in my bones that Alfred Kazin was right to suggest that ‘the deepest side of being American is the sense of being like nothing before us in history’ – a historical conceit that privileged biography as the narrative of the exceptionalist experience. David Levering Lewis Read Quote
Harlem was the main chance for the east end of New York, for eastsiders, as that real estate boom that took place in the 1890s – and it was a preposterous one where people bought and sold, and everything appreciated with each sale – and eventually, of course, the house of cards would crumble. David Levering Lewis Read Quote
It was clear to many American working men and women that the Homestead Steel Strike of the early 1890s, when Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick broke the backs of the steel workers, that that was a watershed. David Levering Lewis Read Quote
Harlem was an exciting place in the ’50s. There were nightclubs that, as a student of Columbia, you dashed off to. The community seemed very viable still. David Levering Lewis Read Quote
