In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries you have these great nation states hurling their young men at one another. The victory was really going to rest on who could do the best job of bringing up their kids to become efficient and effective soldiers. That's pretty grandiose, I guess, but I do think that, and thank God it's been the armies of democracy that have emerged from this as the triumphant armies.

The war in Vietnam I thought a dreadful mistake.

Jefferson owned slaves. He did not believe that all were created equal. He was a racist.

World War II, the atomic bomb, the Cold War, made it hard for Americans to continue their optimism.

Crazy Horse saw history as integrated in the present, incorporated into daily life.

Lieutenant Welsh remembered walking around among the sleeping men, and thinking to himself that 'they had looked at and smelled death all around them all day but never even dreamed of applying the term to themselves. They hadn't come here to fear. They hadn't come to die. They had come to win.

I'm no politician. I'm an historian who has learned through a lifetime of studying that nothing in the world beats universal education.