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I didn't mean to spend my life writing American history, which should have been taught in the schools, but I saw no alternative but to taking it on myself. I could think of a lot of cheerier things I'd rather be doing than analyzing George Washington and Aaron Burr. But it came to pass, that was my job, so I did it.

I've always had an abundance of material about the subjects of my biographies.

The vital thing for me is to integrate the history from above with the history from below because only in that way can you show the true consequences of the decisions of Hitler or Stalin or whomever on the ordinary civilians caught up in the battle.

As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.

I read more history books than anything else.

I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.

I came into my teens unaware that most Americans, blacks as well as whites, were ignorant of the main facts of Negro history. And so it was the facts of other histories that I found most intriguing. I fell into a U.S. history major by chance late in my second year at Fisk University.

The only thing that interests me is history - reviewing the past and making something out of it.

I grew up reading the classic novels of Cold War espionage, and I studied Russian history and Soviet foreign policy.