Color categories are on steroids in Latin America. I find that fascinating. It's very difficult for Americans, particularly African-Americans to understand or sympathize with.

So, Mexico, Brazil, they wanted their national culture to be 'blackish' - really brown, a beautiful brown blend. And finally, I discovered that in each of these societies the people at the bottom are the darkest skinned with the most African features.

Keeping the Union together, freeing slaves and being assassinated all added up to creating 'Lincoln the myth.' He overcame a lot of his own prejudices and became what many would consider the first black man's president.

Lincoln would love the fact that Obama is such a great conciliator, trying to transcend ideology.

Because Lincoln is so closely identified with what it is to be American, everyone wants to claim him, to rewrite his story to satisfy their own particular needs. For my own people, it was important to imagine him as the Great Emancipator, the Moses who led us out of slavery.

Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you.

I'm a tech geek.

I have no plans to slow down.

Patriotism is best exemplified through auto-critique.

It's no surprise that White people say things when they are together about Black people.

Lincoln had a tremendous capacity for personal growth - more than any other American President.

Remember, I have a Ph.D. in English literature.

Very few, if any, first-generation black or white or Asian kids will pursue a Ph.D. They'll pursue the professions for economic security. Many will go to law school and/or business school.

If you share a common ancestor with somebody, you're related to them. It doesn't mean that you're going to invite them to the family reunion, but it means that you share DNA.

All historians generalize from particulars. And often, if you look at a historian's footnotes, the number of examples of specific cases is very, very small.

My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tree.

It turns out one of my ancestors fought in the Continental Army, so I was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution.

My father lived to be 97 and played bridge every day up to the end, so I've got a 50 percent chance of living a long life like him.

My father and I made genetics history. We were the first African-Americans and the first father and son anywhere to have their genomes sequenced.

Cuba is like going to a whole other planet. It's so different but it's so similar to the United States, to Miami. It's like a doppelgaenger. It's the mirror image. And I have no doubt, that once Cuba becomes democratic, that it will be the favorite tourist destination for Americans.

In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black.

No one thinks of Mexico and Peru as black. But Mexico and Peru together got 700,000 Africans in the slave trade. The coast of Acapulco was a black city in the 1870s. And the Veracruz Coast on the gulf of Mexico and the Costa Chica, south of Acapulco are traditional black lands.

Most black leaders, whether left, right or center, from Frederick Douglas and Martin Delaney on in the middle of the 19th century have not even wondered about the merits of the capitalist system.

Dr. King's Nobel Prize had a more powerful transforming effect on him than I think he realized at the time.