I'm interested in Russian language, culture, history... and I lived there, for four years, as a reporter for the Washington Post and have visited many times since.
Who can doubt that between the English and the French, between the Scotch and the Irish, there are differences of character which have profoundly affected and still affect the course of history?
But it is one of these sort of mythologies about America and its intellectual history, that the right embraced this thing called social Darwinism, when it never did so.
I'm also fascinated by the interplay between personal history and the larger forces that form the context for our lives.
I take the world very personally. I take history personally; I want to place myself in the larger context.
Hollywood has a history of raising expectations beyond Washington's reach, of appealing to the very American desire to mythologize political leaders, particularly the president.
I teach at USC, and it's obvious to anyone who teaches college students that they don't cover much modern history and certainly not the modern presidency.
It's absolutely crucial for the Democrats to have a sense of their history, of who they are, in order to be able to project their values and stand up for them.
For thousands of years, men have written history, so it seems to me that most of what we've read is from the male point of view.
The history of storytelling isn't one of simply entertaining the masses but of also advising, instructing, challenging the status quo.
After all my years of playing soldiers, and then of reading History, I have almost a mania to be in the East, to see fighting, and to serve.
What is public history but a register of the successes and disappointments, the vices, the follies and the quarrels of those who engage in contention for power.
It's been my policy to view the Internet not as an 'information highway', but as an electronic asylum filled with babbling loonies.
Don't send funny greeting cards on birthdays or at Christmas. Save them for funerals, when their cheery effect is needed.
A man of great memory without learning hath a rock and a spindle and no staff to spin.
I'm not a great believer in awards-of course the fact that I've never won one has nothing to do with it at all!
The more painful it is, tragically, the more you do learn, though, that's the good part.
The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.
Holding our own government to account for the use of its power is, in my view, the highest mission of a U.S. news organization.
How many writers in history have ever been as famous as Stephen King? He casts an awfully long shadow.
A political convention is not a place where you can come away with any trace of faith in human nature.
