To be a slaveholder meant one had to regard the African American as inferior in every way.

American is the first democratic nation-state.

When Hitler declared war on the United States, he was betting that German soldiers, raised up in the Hitler Youth, would always out fight American soldiers, brought up in the Boy Scouts. He lost that bet. The Boy Scouts had been taught how to figure their way out of their own problems.

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.

Washington, not Jefferson, freed his slaves upon his death.

Nothing is inevitable in life. People make choices, and those choices have results, and we all live with the results.

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