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

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.

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.

Germ theory, which secularized infectious disease, had a side effect: it sacralized epidemiology.

The world may not be getting better and better, but our devices are getting newer and newer.

Republicans were more pro-choice than Democrats up until the late 1980s.

In antihistory, time is an illusion.