In antihistory, time is an illusion.

Epidemiologists study patterns in order to combat infection. Stories about epidemics follow patterns, too. Stories arent often deadly, but they can be virulent: spreading fast, weakening resistance, wreaking havoc.

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

The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect. Reverence just doesnt enter into it.

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

My mother married my father in 1956. She was twenty-eight, and he was thirty-one. She loved him with a fierce steadiness borne of loyalty, determination, and an unyielding dignity.

History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence. In the writing of history, a story without an argument fades into antiquarianism; an argument without a story risks pedantry. Writing history requires empathy, inquiry, and debate. It requires forswearing condescension, cant, and nostalgia. The past isn’t quaint. Much of it, in fact, is bleak.