83
" ocean would carry them to their ancestors.23 The English who crossed the ocean endured the hazards of the voyage under altogether different circumstances, but the perils of the passage left their traces on them, too, in memoirs and stories, and in their bonds to one another. In the summer of 1620, a year after the White Lion landed off the coast of Virginia, the Mayflower, a 180-ton, three-masted, square-rigged merchant vessel, lay anchored in the harbor of the English "
― Jill Lepore , These Truths: A History of the United States
86
" In 1835, Americans in Texas rebelled against Mexican rule, waging a war under the command of a political daredevil named Sam Houston. In 1836, Texas declared its independence, founding the Republic of Texas, with Houston its president. Mexico’s president, General Antonio López de Santa Anna, warned that, if he were to discover that the U.S. government had been behind the Texas rebellion, he would march “his army to Washington and place upon its Capitol the Mexican flag. "
― Jill Lepore , These Truths: A History of the United States
87
" The immigration restriction regime begun in 1924 hardened racial lines, institutionalized new forms of race-based discrimination, codified the fiction of a “white race,” and introduced a new legal category into American life: the “illegal alien.” Europeans, deemed “white,” classified into their national origins, and ranked according to their desirability, could immigrate in limited numbers; entering the United States as legal aliens, they could become naturalized citizens. Chinese, Japanese, Indians, and other Asians, deemed nonwhite, could not immigrate into the United States legally, were deemed unassimilable, and were excluded from citizenship on racial grounds. More profoundly, the law categorized Europeans as belonging to nations—they were sorted by “national origin”—but categorized non-Europeans as belonging to “races”—they were sorted into five “colored races” (black, mulatto, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian). "
― Jill Lepore , These Truths: A History of the United States
99
" Lincoln would remain a man trapped in time, in the click of a shutter and by the trigger of a gun. In mourning him, in sepia and yellow, in black and white, beneath plates of glinting glass, Americans deferred a different grief, a vaster and more dire reckoning with centuries of suffering and loss, not captured by any camera, not settled by any amendment, the injuries wrought on the bodies of millions of men, women, and children, stolen, shackled, hunted, whipped, branded, raped, starved, and buried in unmarked graves. "
― Jill Lepore , These Truths: A History of the United States