Perhaps the most important lesson of the New Social Historians is that history belongs to those about whom or whose documents survive.
Bruce Jackson

War is an abstraction.
Bruce Jackson

Bridges become frames for looking at the world around us.
Bruce Jackson

The web continues to be a source of important photographs you see nowhere else.
Bruce Jackson

The daily press, the immediate media, is superb at synecdoche, at giving us a small thing that stands for a much larger thing. Reporters on the ground, embedded or otherwise, can tell us about or send us pictures of what happened in that place at that time among those people.
Bruce Jackson

The U.S. government has in recent years fought what it termed wars against AIDs, drug abuse, poverty, illiteracy and terrorism. Each of those wars has budgets, legislation, offices, officials, letterhead - everything necessary in a bureaucracy to tell you something is real.
Bruce Jackson

We entered the 20th century trying to deal with three ideas purporting to define or describe or explain three spheres of action, development and conflict: Darwin on the natural world, Freud on the internal world, Marx on the economic world.
Bruce Jackson

Which suggests something about media and war: it's not just that events happen and the media documents and presents them. There is a third element: what the public is ready to accept, what the public wants to know.
Bruce Jackson