I have a lot of books I want to write.

Animals interest me more than anything else.

I feel like I'm always learning from people.

Reagan was a pure liberation, free-and-fair election American.

The superhighway of celebrity and showmanship is filled with debris.

I'm not a historian who thinks Confederate memorials should be boarded up.

Rosa Parks' entire career has been one as working as a civil rights activist.

The answer to New Orleans's levee woes is painfully obvious: money and willpower.

Walter Cronkite had a golden rule for all wartime reporters: never self-aggrandize.

Hurricane Katrina is without question the worst natural disaster in American history.

Nixon was always willing to be bipartisan, so there are a lot of surprises in the man.

Politicians wanted to mine the Grand Canyon for zinc and copper, and Theodore Roosevelt said no.

Politicians wanted to mine the Grand Canyon for zinc and copper, and Theodore Roosevelt said, 'No.'

I learned more about history and literature in the used bookstores in DC than in college libraries.

New Orleans is just a microcosm of Newark and Detroit and hundreds of other troubled urban locales.

Richard Kerry not only was a pilot in World War II, but was a civil servant. He did not come from money.

I was stunned to find out there had never been a serious, scholarly biography ever written on Rosa Parks.

President Abraham Lincoln never lost his ardor for the United States to remain united during the Civil War.

History chalks up Mr. McKinley's War as a U.S. win, and he also polls favorably as a 'near great' president.

Knievel seemed braver and more brazen - and more unhinged - than any other athlete-cum-thrill-seeker of his era.

Stubbornness is a positive quality of presidential leadership - if you're right about what you're stubborn about.

John Kerry can be absolutely ruthless. I would not want to be on his enemies list when he's ready to go after you.

The myth-making about Appomattox started from the moment Lee left the courthouse on his horse to travel to Richmond.

It is a long revisionist road up from the bottom for George W. Bush. He is ranked toward the bottom rung of presidents.

For Dylan, it seems, life is always the next gig. Changing pace and location are essential to his survival as an artist.

John Kerry only went to prep schools because he had an aunt who had the money to pay for his way into those prep schools.

One of the things I learned in editing 'The Reagan Diaries' is to never say what Reagan would do, because he surprised people.

Theodore Roosevelt had been enthralled with the idea of Texas since 1883, when he arrived in the Dakota Territory to ranch cattle.

There is nobody that's ever going to fill Ted Kennedy's shoes, and that's a tall order for somebody in the family to try to live up to.

As a composer, Dylan now fits comfortably alongside George Gershwin or Irving Berlin, though he grumpily refuses to wear any man's collar.

In Austin, the eco-capital of Texas, residents tend to favor native plants and wildflowers to the sculpted lawns of the Palm Springs variety.

Over the past four decades no reporter has critiqued the American South with such evocative sensitivity and bedrock honesty as Curtis Wilkie.

There is no real way to categorize McLean's 'American Pie' for its hybrid of modern poetry and folk ballad, beer-hall chant and high-art rock.

While the scars of the monstrous Civil War still remain, the wounds have closed since 1865, in large part, because of the civility of Grant and Lee.

The Rough Riders brought honor to San Antonio by winning battles in Cuba throughout the summer of 1898, and Roosevelt became a Texas folk hero overnight.

One thing 'not right' on the 50th anniversary of the Selma marches is the sad fact that the Edmund Pettus Bridge hasn't been renamed the John Lewis Bridge.

If you're a Kennedy and you go to Italy or you go to Argentina, you're treated as royalty. And in the United States, we're endlessly fascinated by the family.

How one deals with the death of a loved one is a highly personalized affair. Some people weep for days; others take a hike in the woods or count rosary beads.

I think, along with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks will go down as one of the two most well-known and remembered figures out of the Civil Rights Movement.

Usually, one day in a century rises above the others as an accepted turning point or historic milestone. It becomes the climactic day, or 'the day,' of that century.

The very fact that Barack Obama - an African-American - was twice elected to the presidency will always be the lead line in that hard-to-meld, gold-plated paragraph.

Unfortunately, one of the biggest misperceptions the American public harbors is that Katrina was a week-long catastrophe. In truth, it's better to view it as an era.

To Armstrong, constantly speaking about 'Apollo 11' only diminished the magic. That's why he worked overtime to avoid notice, living a quiet life in Indian Hill, Ohio.

Everybody trusted Cronkite because he reminded them of their favorite uncle or trusted family physician. Being square in the age of the Beatles made Cronkite retro cool.

The world of high-stakes international diplomacy can be rough and tumble, but it's more often than not a procession of suits and summits, protocol sessions and photo ops.

February was always the cruelest month for Hunter S. Thompson. An avid NFL fan, Hunter traditionally embraced the Super Bowl in January as the high-water mark of his year.

The Middle East is the tinder box of the world, and to be able to remove a nuclear threat of any kind out of Iran, that would have been a big deal, very positive step forward.

We can only imagine the history of the free world today if, at the end of the Civil War, there had been two countries: the United States and the Confederate States of America.

Her continuity - you know, if you connect Harriet Tubman, who died in 1913, to Rosa Parks, born in 1913, you get this extraordinary spectrum of the African-American experience.

When terrorists blew up the Marine barracks in Lebanon, Reagan was frustrated and furious, as Bush was after 9/11. But he didn't stick us in a war in the Middle East with no exit.

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