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Overview
A De Tocqueville for the 21st century, Simon Schama, NBCC Award winning author of Rough Crossings offers an essential, historical, long view analysis of the American character in The American Future. Shama examines four themes—war, race and faith, immigration, and custodianship of the land—through the prism of the historic 2008 presidential election in a magnificent work that the Wall Street Journal calls a “celebration of American resiliency.” Niall Ferguson says, “I hope Obama will have this book on his bedside table.”
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780061669071 |
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Publisher: | HarperCollins |
Publication date: | 06/02/2009 |
Edition description: | Large Print |
Pages: | 704 |
Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.60(d) |
About the Author
![About The Author](http://img.images-bn.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.8.5)
Simon Schama is University Professor of Art History and History at Columbia University in New York. His award-winning books include Scribble, Scribble, Scribble; The American Future: A History; National Book Critics Circle Award winner Rough Crossings; The Power of Art; The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age; Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution; Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations); Landscape and Memory; Rembrandt's Eyes; and the History of Britain trilogy. He has written and presented forty television documentary films for the BBC, PBS, and The History Channel, including the Emmy-winning Power of Art, on subjects that range from John Donne to Tolstoy.
Read an Excerpt
The American Future
A HistoryBy Simon Schama
Ecco
Copyright © 2009 Simon SchamaAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-06-053923-8
Chapter One
American WarVeterans Day: 11 November 2007
"America has never been a warrior culture."
Just because it was Dick Cheney saying this didn't automatically make it untrue, even on Veterans Day in Arlington National Cemetery, a year before the election. Patriotic chest-thumping from an impenitent vice president was not what anyone, least of all the veterans themselves, wanted to hear. Bodies of young American men and women were showing up regularly at Section 60, at the foot of the grassy hill. Mustard-colored backhoes stood parked in a row, steel claws raised, ready to dig. Every so often, on the hour, a soft clop of horses' hooves could be heard coming over the dips and rises of the cemetery park before a reversed gun carriage rolled into view. Most weekdays, every hour or so, those small, sad parades do the funerary honors as tourist buses are diverted to alternative routes, heading for the Unknown Soldier or JFK. But if you walk the green vales of Arlington, you can catch young soldiers of the 3rd Infantry getting ready for their next duty, operating the forklifts that hoist coffins onto the carriages. Others grab a quiet smoke beneath the plane trees before dressing the horses and getting on their ceremonials. Out in Samarra and Helmand andMosul and Kandahar a great many more mutilated and eviscerated bodies, not American, are being tended to as best as possible without benefit of flag or drums. Only the keening sounds the same.
But at Arlington, on Veterans Day 2007, in Memorial Amphitheater there was no howling, except from small children squirming against the captivity of their mothers' laps. Cheney would utter the consolatory pieties with studied quietness, his voice falling at the end of the sentence, as if the avoidance of vocal histrionics were itself a symptom of truth-telling. Perhaps he has Theodore Roosevelt's injunction to "speak softly and carry a big stick" framed over the vice presidential desk. When, every so often, an infant would let rip with an aaaighw, the note bouncing off the columns, Cheney would look up from the teleprompter, sight line briefly changed and then move impassively to the next homily, like a tank rolling over a cat.
It was warm on 11 November, and the temper in the amphitheater was jocund. Sunlight falling on cherry-red caps and coats turned veteran marines into a gathering of jolly elves. The oompah from the big orchestra was classical lite, and the procession of colors into the amphitheater could have been any high-school parade but for the many years of the standard-bearers. Studded biker jackets decorated with Vietnam insignia-"Hells' Harriers," "Dragon Breath"-draped the gutswagged bodies of old grunts, but behind the bandannas of yore they had lost their heavy-metal menace, their righteously roaring grievance. Now they were just living exhibits in the museum of stoned-age warfare, the walking wounded of the Sha-Na Na-tion. More speeches droned; more Andrew Lloyd Webber chirped; and the volunteer "service" being eulogized was rapidly turning into social granola: "veterans helping out in communities" more akin to the coast guard or the scouts; nothing to do with bombs and bullets. If Iraq and Afghanistan had turned out not to be a picnic, Veterans Day at Arlington certainly felt like one.
But America has two specified days of military remembrance; one when the leaves are fallen, the other when they spread into full spring splendor. Created after the Civil War, Memorial Day was originally known as Decoration Day from the spontaneous habit of military widows decorating graves with wreaths of white flowers. In 1868 the commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, General John Logan, decided to institutionalize a day of remembrance-for both the Union and Confederate dead-and specified the third Monday in May. For most of the country, Memorial Day is about the inauguration of warmth. Garage sales lay out their wares in driveways. America's men go through their tribal ritual firing up the grill for the first cookout. Meat meets heat, beer cans pop and hiss, and somewhere, everywhere, a microtractor is harvesting a suburban lawn. But even if the lines of spectators at the parades are thin, some remembering does get done in small-town America. In Sleepy Hollow, New York, where a statue commemorates the "honest militiamen" who caught the British spy Major André in 1780, a dozen or so veterans, some of them octogenarian survivors of Pearl Harbor and Normandy, followed behind a high-school marching band of big girls dressed in glossy black boots, pleated black miniskirts, and scarlet jackets, strangely reminiscent of the British redcoats the "honest militiamen" had thwarted. The band murdered "Sloop John B" (a baffling selection) and "God Bless America," and an endless procession of fire trucks from neighboring towns followed, each bearing heraldic insignia ("Conquest Hook and Ladder 46"), before the parade ended up at a flower-decorated "Patriots' Park" (named for the Revolutionary War). There, amid the dogs and babies and aunties and wives, the dignitaries did something surprising: they connected with history. The commander of the local American Legion, a World War II survivor, read the entirety of General Logan's Order Number 11 from 1868, as though it had just been issued, stumbling a little over its great flights of Lincolnian rhetoric, asking for the perpetuation of tender sentiment for those "whose breasts were made barricades between our enemies [that is, other Americans] and our country." The Lincolnian tone was sustained when the mayor of Tarrytown read an abbreviated version of the Gettysburg Address, although why he thought fit to shorten a speech that is only 400 words in the first place was mysterious. The dead of that immense slaughter and the president in his high hat were summoned from November 1863 to cookout day 2008, to mix and mingle with the old Vietnam grunts in Ranger hats. But was this just an empty flourish? Was it safer, easier, to invoke Gettysburg and Antietam than dwell on the fifty-two American servicemen and women killed just the previous month in Iraq and Afghanistan?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The American Future by Simon Schama Copyright © 2009 by Simon Schama . Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Prologue Iowa Waltz 1
I American War
1 Veterans Day: II November 2007 25
2 The fight for the citadel: soldiering and the Founding Fathers 33
3 The Drop Zone Cafe, San Antonio, Texas, 3 March 2008 55
4 The trials of the Roman 59
5 Taking sides 70
6 Father and son 78
7 The quartermaster general, 1861-64 85
8 John Rodgers Meigs, the Shenandoah Valley, summer and fall 1864 100
9 Montgomery Meigs and Louisa Rodgers Meigs, October 1864-December 1865 103
10 Washington, D.C., February 2008 108
11 Hamilton resurrexit 111
12 American war: Rohrbach-lès-Bitche, the Maginot Line near Metz, 10 December 1944 123
II American Fervor
13 Atlantic City, August 1964 130
14 Saved 138
15 Raven, Virginia, 2008 148
16 Providence 152
17 "Whereas Almighty God hath created the mind free…" 161
18 National Sin 176
19 Jarena Lee 186
20 The sovereignty of the voice 195
21 Easter Sunday, 2008, Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta 206
22 Great white hopes? 210
23 Ruleville, Mississippi, 31 August 1962 213
III What is An American?
24 Twilight, Downing Street, June 2008 219
25 Citizen Heartbreak: France, August 1794 223
26 The German threat 238
27 The Chicken Club, south Texas, July 2008 244
28 The immigrant problem in Texas 246
29 The German threat-again 263
30 The importance of Fred Bee 268
31 Grace under pressure 283
32 Jefferson's Koran 295
IV American Plenty
33 Running on empty? 303
34 Strawberry fields, 1775 312
35 White Path, 1801-23 316
36 1893 330
37 The church of irrigation 336
38 Ghost house 344
39 Roll up that lawn 351
40 Windmills 357
Epilogue: The Impotent Angel? 363
Bibliography 371
Acknowledgments 379
Picture Acknowledgments 383
Index 385
What People are Saying About This
“His specialty is finding interesting midlevel characters from the buried mounds of history and telling their stories. In the first great chunk of the book, he tells the stories of the Meigses...gripping portraits...Simon Schama the outstanding historian still survives.”
“I hope Obama will have this book on his bedside table. A more inspiring evocation of the spirit of liberal America—past, present and future—does not exist.”