American history. I thought i would start by spending five or ten minutes just talking about the book. Partly its genesis and partly the kinds of questions that arose, which for me, gave the book a kind of larger scope than i had originally intended. The quotations that are in the book, the slogans and catchphrases, up until 1955 were easy for me to remember because i am a child of the forties. That is what i learned in school. That is how we learned history in school. Either the books that we took out of the library in fourth or fifth grade, or the way history was taught. But when i got to graduate school in the sixties, i discovered that some of my fellow students who came from overseas would come to meet periodically, as one woman did, and said, who is this joe and why should he say it aint so . So i told her the story. And then, much much later, a friend of ours who is an immigrant doctor from south africa came to me and said, why do my patience, when they see me, say whats up doc