American culture-movies and museums, fiction and journalism-is consumed with the most terrible subjects of the country’s history: slavery, Native American removal, continental conquest, the betrayal of Reconstruction, Jim Crow, colonialism, militarism. We’re now living in a golden age of fatalism. It was an optimistic narrative, reassuring, shallow, and badly in need of a corrective. led the cause of freedom against fascism and communism Japanese internment, McCarthyism, and Vietnam were mistakes that didn’t erase the larger picture. There was no atoning for the near elimination of Native Americans, but somehow it didn’t invalidate the story of progress. The vote was extended to more and more Americans-starting with white men, then women, Black people, and finally even 18-year-olds-thus fulfilling the promise of democracy. Slavery was evil, but the Civil War ended it then the civil-rights movement ended segregation. W hen I was in school, American history was taught as a series of triumphs over wrongs that belonged to the past.
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