A great deal of what many Americans hold dear is nowhere written on those four pages of parchment, or in any of the amendments. What has made the Constitution durable is the same as what makes it demanding: the fact that so much was left out.

History is a long and endlessly interesting argument, where evidence is everything and storytelling is everything else.

Nineteenth-century grass-roots populism made twentieth-century progressivism possible.

History is hereditary only in this way: we, all of us, inherit everything, and then we choose what to cherish, what to disavow, and what to do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from.

In kindergarten, you can learn how to be a citizen of the world.

Old reference books are like tree rings. Without them, there'd be no way to know what a tree had lived through.

Mainly, the more faddish and newer stages of life are really just marketing schemes. Tweenhood. The young old. The quarter-life crisis.