Professor Randall was a great advisor and a great mentor. He taught me, I think, in the best possible way. He was not a brilliant lecturer. His courses were fairly pedestrian. I didn’t think his seminars were particularly interesting. But working with him on a one-to-one basis as his assistant, I think that’s the way one has to learn to be a historian. That is, he was writing, and if he needed some particular reference, I had to go find it and get it. If he was writing, he wanted everything checked meticulously over and over again. So I had to take the manuscript over to the library and check it all out. So that by working closely with him, I got to see, first of all, a lot of the library and its extensive holdings, but I got, even more important, to understand what a scholar is about. It is about care. It is about “pains-taking.” It is about judgment as well as it’s about very skillful writing. He was an excellent writer as well. So in that sense, Professor Randall and Mrs. Randall shaped my future career.

Growing up, it was the music, the style, it was what you saw, what you read, what you looked at, the vernacular that influenced you the most. I carried that, it was so important to me.

One of my mentors, Tom Frank, a professor of law at NYU, he was really instrumental in making me understand that we need to look at the global picture, and we always need to not take anything for granted, but go very much through a process of critical thinking before we formulate our views. So he was, I think, instrumental in shaping my views as to how to pursue my career in the future.

Well absolutely Sondheim was an influence, because he was in many ways this door into the world of theater and he is a phenomenal composer. He’s also a phenomenal mentor.