Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know.

Like Lincoln, I would like to believe the ballot is stronger than the bullet. Then again, he said that before he got shot.

History is full of really good stories. That's the main reason I got into this racket: I want to make the argument that history is interesting.

One night last summer, all the killers in my head assembled on a stage in Massachusetts to sing show tunes.

The people who visit the [Lincoln] memorial always look like an advertisement for democracy, so bizarrely, suspiciously diverse that one time I actually saw a man in a cowboy hat standing there reading the Gettysburg Address next to a Hasidic Jew. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had linked arms with a woman in a burka and a Masai warrior, to belt out ‘It’s a Small World After All,’ flanked by a chorus line of nuns and field-tripping, rainbow-skinned schoolchildren

The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Civil War-when I really think about them they all seem about as likely as the parting of the Red Sea.

Why is America the last best hope of Earth? What if it's Liechtenstein? Or, worse, Canada?