As a kid, I was growing up in an era of celebration of the Civil War centennial, with a lot of 'Lost Cause' emphasis on the Confederacy. I used to play Civil War soldiers with my brothers as a child, and my older brother always insisted that he got to be Lee, and I got be Grant. I never knew that Grant won until quite some time had passed.

When I was growing up in Virginia, the Civil War was presented to me as glorious with dramatic courage and military honor. Later, I realized how death was central to the reality. It was at the core of women's lives. It's what they talked about most.

Albert Camus's 'La Peste' - 'The Plague' - had an enormous impact on me when I read it in high school French class, and I chose my senior yearbook quote from it. In college, I wrote a philosophy class paper on Camus and Sartre, and again chose my yearbook quote from 'La Peste.'

Since the middle of the twentieth century, our understanding of the American past has been revolutionized, in no small part because of our altered conceptions of the place of race in the nation's history.

Everything has to do with education: If you educate the girls, you educate the family, the community, and society, in general.

I just kept telling myself that ultimately, the money that my grandparents had put away to go into my college fund, that they were investing for me to go to school and get this education, it had to be worth something.

My brother was the first to be home-schooled, and one reason they home-schooled me was so he wouldn't get jealous. Another thing is my mom noticed that I would stress out a lot about school. I would ask my teacher how good my grades were and think about that all the time.

Children have to be motivated to want to learn to read. Reading must not be taught simply as a school exercise.