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.

Epidemics follow patterns because diseases follow patterns. Viruses spread; they reproduce; they die.

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

Jane Francklyne, born in 1565, had lived for less than a month. She left very little behind. She was buried in the Ecton churchyard, but her father would hardly have paid a carver to engrave so small a stone. If not for the parish register, there would be no record that this Jane Francklyne had ever lived at all. History is what is written and can be found; what isn't saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by the earth.

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

Disrupt, and you will be saved.

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