Students will start finding history interesting when their teachers and textbooks stop lying to them.

Conclusions are not always pleasant.

The world, of course, doesn't come divided into disciplines. The world just is.

Many Americans have never owned a book. And others have never owned a non-fiction book. Providing them with a 300-page paperback would get them started, maybe. And even if it didn't, at least they'd own that one. So that's a serious problem.

Christopher Columbus introduced two phenomena that revolutionized race relations and transformed the modern world: the taking of land, wealth, and labor from indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere, leading to their near extermination, and the transatlantic slave trade, which created a racial underclass.

In sum, U.S. history is no more violent and oppressive than the history of England, Russia, Indonesia, or Burundi - but neither is it exceptionally less violent.

Textbooks pretty much have no real drama. They have no real storyline. To the extent they have a storyline.