"The frontier will nevertheless survive in the attitudes a few of us inherited from it. One of those attitudes—to me a beatitude—is the conviction that the past matters, that history weighs on us and refuses to be forgotten by us, and that the worst poverty women—or men—can suffer is to be bereft of their past."

"s Americans, our identity does not rest on race, religion, blood, or soil, but on a historical proposition, that all men are created equal. Take that away, render it vain, illusory, or nugatory, and w…"

"Flesh is our indisputable commonality. Whatever our race, our religion, our politics we are faced every morning with the fact of our bodies. Their frailties, their demands, their desires. And yet the …"

"Having spent the whole day sifting through incredibly depressing news reports, were bouncing back to a kind of giddy frame of mind brought on by a combination of completely natural and understandable …"

"In this book I have coined two words ‘established’ and ‘enthusiastic’. By ‘established’ historians I mean self-proclaimed secular, progressive or left historians who have established an academic empir…"