Notable Historians, Posters & Prints “A...-”
educational posters for social studies classrooms, home schools, and theme decor for office.

Lord Acton
Henry Adams

Stephen Ambrose
Appian

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton
b. 1-10-1834; Naples, Italy
d. 6-19-1902; Germany

John Acton was an English historian and professor of history who planned the Cambridge Modern History.

Lord Acton quotes ~
• “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
• “Great men are almost always bad men.”
• “There is no worse heresy than the fact that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”
• “Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right to do what we ought.”
• “There is not a soul who does not have to beg alms of another, either a smile, a handshake, or a fond eye.”
• “The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern: every class is unfit to govern.”

Henry Adams
b. 2-16-1838; Boston, MA
d. 3-27-1918; Washington, DC

Journalist Henry Adams, Professor of Medieval History at Harvard, is most remembered for his introspective autobiography The Education of Henry Adams where he concluded that traditional classical education failed to prepare him for the scientific and technological 20th century. Education won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize.

Stephen Ambrose
b. 1-10-1936; Lovington, IL
d. 10-13-2002; Washington, DC

History professor Stephen Ambrose was the biographer of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon as well as a best selling author of books like Band of Brothers.

Stephen Ambrose quotes ~
• “As to the Indians, the guiding principle was, promise them anything just so long as they get out of the way.”
• “Dams have harmed our wildlife and made rivers less useful for recreation.”
• “History is everything that has ever happened.”
• “I was taught by professors who had done their schooling in the 1930s. Most of them were scornful of, even hated, big business.”
• “I'm no politician. I'm an historian who has learned through a lifetime of studying that nothing in the world beats universal education.”

Appian
b. c. 95 - c. 165; Alexandria, Egypt

Appian, also known as Appianus, was an ethnic Greek who wrote a series of monographs during the reigns of Trajan (53-117), Hadrian (76-138) and Antonius Pius (86-161). Appian's accounts recorded various peoples and countries from their earliest times until their incorporation into the Roman Empire. The most important surviving fragments concern the Civil Wars and the end of the Roman Republic.

FYI - The Appian Way, or Via Appia, was named for Appius Claudius Caecus, a censor, who began and completed the first section as a military road c. 312 BC. FYI - a censor was an official responsible for public morality, hence the modern understanding of ‘censorship’.

Karen Armstrong
b. 11-14-1944; Worcestershire, England

Karen Armstrong, author of A History of God, is a former Catholic nun.

Karen Armstrong quotes ~
• “Every fundamentalist movement I've studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is convinced at some gut, visceral level that secular liberal society wants to wipe out religion.”
• “Fundamentalists are not friends of democracy. And that includes your fundamentalists in the United States.”
• “There are some forms of religion that are bad, just as there's bad cooking or bad art or bad sex, you have bad religion too.”
• “Now I think one of the reasons why religion developed in the way that it did over the centuries was precisely to curb this murderous bent that we have as human beings.”
• “Islam is a religion of success. Unlike Christianity, which has as its main image, in the west at least, a man dying in a devastating, disgraceful, helpless death.”

Thomas Arnold
b. 6-13-1795; Isle of Wight
d. 6-12-1842; heart attack

Historian and educator Thomas Arnold is best remembered for the reforms he initiated as head master of Rugby School from 1828-1841 and as a character in Tom Brown's Schooldays, a novel by Thomas Hughes.

Thomas Arnold was the father of poet Matthew Arnold and Mary Augusta Arnold who published novels as Mrs Humphry Ward. Another daughter, Julia, married Leonard Huxley, the son of Thomas Huxley and their sons were Julian and Aldous Huxley.