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

History is important. More than any other topic, it is about us. Whether one deems our present society wondrous or awful or both, history reveals how we got to this point.

We preach democracy while supporting dictatorships.

We still have to realize that if you are say a historian of the Civil War, you don’t know anything special about say Columbus or for that matter the 20th century. You are a consumer of that information, especially if it’s stuff like Columbus and the American Indians. That information isn’t even in history, much of it. Much of it is in anthropology or archeology.

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

I'm looking forward to the future, which is a good thing, because it's coming.

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