It has been said that history is biography, although you wouldn’t know it by reading many history books. Too often stories, quotes, and anecdotes are replaced with analysis, statistics, grand social movements, and dates piled upon one another. No wonder people find history boring. We don’t, and that’s because the nature of our work—publishing a history magazine for a general audience—continually forces us to ask a simple question: What’s really interesting about this? Most of the time,