It turns out one of my ancestors fought in the Continental Army, so I was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution.

Very few, if any, first-generation black or white or Asian kids will pursue a Ph.D. They'll pursue the professions for economic security. Many will go to law school and/or business school.

There's a boom in genealogy now. With ancestry.com and other sites digitizing so many of the records, you can now find things in a few minutes that used to take months.

All historians generalize from particulars. And often, if you look at a historian's footnotes, the number of examples of specific cases is very, very small.

Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you.

My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tree.

I want to get into the educational DNA of American culture. I want 10 percent of the common culture, more or less, to be black.