Since the middle of the twentieth century, our understanding of the American past has been revolutionized, in no small part because of our altered conceptions of the place of race in the nation's history.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States embarked on a new relationship with death, entering into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history, a war that would presage the slaughter of World War I's Western Front and the global carnage of the twentieth century.

Fascism is a religion. The twentieth century will be known in history as the century of Fascism.

It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology.

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.

If the end of the twentieth century can be characterized by futurism, the twenty-first can be defined by presentism.