In this article, the author recalls the time she met Gary Nash at UCLA on July 13, 1992, when they began the work of creating the National Standards in History. Professor Nash was the leader in the development of the United States History Standards. In creating the Standards, they were to focus on Historical Thinking. They needed to organize the historical understandings, "what students should know," based on a series of questions divided by five categories: (1) Politics; (2) Society; (3) Economics/Technology; (4) International Relations; and (5) Ideas and Images. This process began an intellectual feast for a precollegiate teacher. They had to grapple with a series of questions, develop its significance, and incorporate it into a standard. Historical understanding requires students to think through cause and effect relationships, fosters paradox and complexity, avoids contingency as an explanation, and distinguishes between anecdote and analysis. The focus on "thick description" as a category of analysis requires the distinction of subtleties. Professor Nash spent countless hours developing the questions that were to be the focus of their endeavors. The questions were based on the latest historical scholarship which was particularly stimulating and exciting. The author presents some of the examples of this process and concludes with an example of the kind of scholarship that enriched her teaching and resulted in a standard on the impact of the American Revolution on women.