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

Trial by jury. Live wherever you can make a living. How could a government based on such principles fail?

It is through history that we learn who we are and how we got that way, why and how we changed, why the good sometimes prevailed and sometimes did not.

You don't hate history, you hate the way it was taught to you in high school.

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

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

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.