Imagine if baseball were taught the way science is taught in most inner-city schools. Schoolchildren would get lectures about the history of the World Series. High school students would occasionally reproduce famous plays of the past. Nobody would get in the game themselves until graduate school.
I was attending the University of Alberta. I was going to be a high school teacher, like my parents. I failed - no, I didn't fail a class, I just barely passed. I really didn't try. It was Canadian history, through the plays of the time. My God, those were boring plays.
I've been writing American history for a long time, and I've had a hard time finding strong, interesting female characters. There are women, of course, in American history, but they're hard to write about because they don't leave much of a historical trace, and they're not usually involved in high-profile public events.
From an early age, Yosemite became the centre of my universe. I've been going every summer since I was a child. I love everything about that place: waterfalls, high-quality rock, history.
There are some real memorable highlights in my history that, in my mind, are such milestones. Winning a national championship in college and being on the Olympic platform getting a gold medal. Visiting the Hall of Fame and going into the Hall of Fame.
The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.
Having a track record to live up to and the history of successes had become a hindrance. It becomes harder to break out of what people expect you to do.
The notion that Western religions are more rigid than those of Asia is overdrawn. Ours is the most permissive society history has ever known - almost the only thing that is forbidden now is to forbid - and Asian teachers and their progeny play up to this propensity by soft-pedaling Hinduism's, Buddhism's, Sufism's rules.
Like the attack on Pearl Harbor, another hinge event in American history, 9/11 was a great tactical victory for America's enemies. But in both these cases, the tactical success of the attacks was not matched by strategic victories. Quite the reverse.
Jaipur is the capital of Rajasthan and, in my opinion, the best place to visit. It is an amazing hub of history. It's called the Pink City because all the architecture has a hint of pink in the stones used. It's an amazing stop for all kinds of food but also for history and shopping. It has a little bit of everything.
The hippie movement politicized my generation. When it ended, we all started looking back at our own history, looking, in my case, for motives of rebellion.
I have a hippopotamus skull next to my bed, called Gregory. When I was six, my three sisters and I clubbed together and paid £4 for it in a junk shop. We collected owl pellets, ostrich eggs and sheep skulls for our natural history museum at home.
Throughout Johnson Space Center's history, contributions to STEM innovation and discoveries has been both through new technologies developed to advance human spaceflight and through educating, inspiring, and hiring students in STEM fields.
If we're going to be successful and be considered credible in the Hispanic community, we've got to denounce some of the ignorant statements that are made about Hispanics and the contributions we make, whether it's to the military, our nation's economy, or to the history of Texas.
Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I like to call them.
We cannot leave history entirely to nonclinical observers and to professional historians.
God cannot alter the past, though historians can.
People in millenniums ahead will know what we were like in the 1930's and the thing that, the important major things that shaped our history at that time. This is as important for historic reasons as any other.
It's a very good historical book about history.
