Americans are a morally ambitious, aspirational people. They are also a pragmatic people. These two qualities often find themselves at odds, and American citizenship often takes a seemingly self-contradictory form because it can manifest itself as criticism of America’s shortcomings in the light of her moral aspirations, or deep appreciation and affection for what she has achieved and accomplished in the light of the difficulties she has faced.
These two manifestations of American patriotism are today locked in battle over how to view American history, which some, in the light of her founding aspirations, deem to be irredeemably unjust, and others, in the light of the pragmatic, see as an undeserved gift today’s citizens are blessed to inherit. Recent battles over Columbus Day and Civil War-era memorials to Confederate soldiers may be taken as representative of this bifurcation among the citizenry.
Unfortunately, both of these visions of American history tend to obscure the mystery and messiness contained in history, American or otherwise. More often than not, history is a kind of stage on which breathtaking, beautiful, and sometimes dreadful things occur, and it is the historian’s task to tell the story of these things, and to inquire into why they happened the way they did, where they did, and when they did.
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