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

Stages of life are artifacts. Adolescence is a useful contrivance, midlife is a moving target, senior citizens are an interest group, and tweenhood is just plain made up.

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

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

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.

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.

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.