The mind demands pattern and form, which build up slowly and require repeated passes, with each pass going deeper and probing further.

Just as math is more than a collection of theorems, history is more than a collection of facts. It’s an intellectual enterprise that requires piecing together a cogent and accurate story from partial scraps of faded words. And the process never ends. Its destination leads to a new beginning. True historical inquiry must end where it begins: with a question mark.

Woodrow Wilson claimed that history endows us with the “invaluable mental power we call judgment.

Woodrow Wilson claimed that history endows us with the "invaluable mental power we call judgment.

The hardest work begins in dry dock.

History teacher Bob Alston's "expertise late not in his sweeping knowledge of the topic but in his ability to pick after a tumble, to get a fix on what he does not know, and to generate a roadmap to guide his new learning. He was an expert at cultivating puzzlement it was Alston's ability to stand back from first impressions, to question his quick leaps of mind, to keep track of his questions that together pointed him in the direction of new learning.

(The historian) "was able to disapprove without being astonished. She could reject and still understand.

If history is to have relevance in the digital age, it must make us allergic to the point of nausea to claims attached to spurious evidence--even if issued from the highest offices in the land

The study of history should be a mind-altering encounter that leaves one forever unable to consider the social world without asking questions about where a claim comes from, who’s making it, and how time and place shape human behavior.

The problem is not the content of textbooks, but the very idea of them.