The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and inclusive history.

The layout of textbooks, I think, has been done with an assumption that students don't read.

History can be a weapon, and it can be used against you.

I've been in towns where there is no library, or where the library for the high school and the library for the town is one room, and it's smaller than my modest living room here. So you don't have many resources in 1950 or even 1970. This is the year, 2013, every town in America is connected to the web. Every town in America is therefore connected to all kinds of resources at the Library of Congress, at 100,000 websites.

Many Americans have never owned a book, and I'm not talking about because of the recent digital revolution. I'm talking about before there even was a digital revolution.

It is always useful to think badly about people one has exploited or plans to exploit... No one likes to think of him or herself as a bad person. To treat badly another person whom we consider a reasonable human being creates a tension between act and attitude that demands resolution. We cannot erase what we have done, and to alter our future behavior may not be in our interest. To change our attitude is easier.

There's no excuse therefore, for a 1,152 page book. I think we should all be using 300-page paperbacks. These exist.