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Dad lived his life in a way that it was his character, not his circumstances, that dictated what his life looked like.

For the Negro, Andrew Johnson did less than nothing when once he realized that the chief beneficiary of labor and economic reform in the South would be freedmen. His inability to picture Negroes as men made him oppose efforts to give them land; oppose national efforts to educate them; and above all things, oppose their rights to vote.

Dad was a great advocate for social justice and a very quiet advocate of the essential Labor values.

Many young men in the 1960s and 1970s came to reject some of the traditional ideas about manhood that many of their fathers tried to pass down - like unquestioning respect for authority even when that might mean killing and dying for questionable or unjust causes such as the Vietnam War.

No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory.

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

The problems of rebellious youth can be traced to homes where the mother disobeyed the father or showed lack of respect for his authority.

To a person growing up in the power of demography, it was clear that history had to do not with the powerful actions of certain men but with the processes of choice and preference.

The abolitionists were not like the rugged people out West, and they were not like John Brown, either. They were people who made speeches and did politics.