-Caveat Lector- >From http://www.newstatesman.co.uk/199905030019.htm The NS Essay - This country is not so special Linda Colley demolishes the historical myths about Britain, the US and Europe Five years ago, in 1994, Britain had two causes for celebration and remembrance. One was the 50th anniversary of the D-Day landings, and we all recall the scale of the commemoration and the sponsorship it received from monarch, ministers and media alike. The second cause for celebration was, or should have been, the opening of the Channel Tunnel, a permanent highway to Continental Europe. Yet in Britain at least, this was a notably low-key event. We discussed the safety of the tunnel, the potential damage to property values in Kent, the effect on our French holidays, the quality of the train service. It was treated, in short, as a late 20th-century amenity, not as an epic event. How strange, and how sad! The idea of a Channel Tunnel has a long history: Brunel lobbied for it, Queen Victoria backed it, Winston Churchill, between the wars, advocated it as a "notable symbol in the advance of human ci vilisation". And the tunnel is one of the greatest engineering feats of the 20th century. Yet in 19 94 we did not feel able properly to celebrate this, thus doing violence both to our history and to our present achievement s. We chose to focus not on our present, not on our future, and not on our long and complicated his tory, but on D-Day and our comparatively recent past. I do not minimise the significance of the second world war or Britain's role in it. But, as Hugo Yo ung has suggested, the notion that this was our finest hour has cast something of a paralysing spel l, in a way that the au thor of that phrase would never have wanted. By remembering a certain version of the war too well, we tend to neglect and misperceive our longer history, and so miss out on possibilities for the pre sent and the future. Britain is a set of islands on the western periphery of Europe. Nonetheless, as a major British pol itician once observed, "our links to . . . the Continent of Europe have been the dominant factor in our history". Who said this? Margaret Thatcher in Bruges in 1988. She was right. For almost four centuries, much of what is now Britain was governed from Rome. From 1066 to the 16t h century, kings of England were also kings of parts of France. At the end of the 17th century, we were ruled by a Dutch m onarch. From 1714 to 1837, German kings ruled over us in tandem with their home state of Hanover. T he impact of all this went far beyond politics into the very texture of our society. The Romans and the Norman French cont ributed to the vocabulary we still use today. Dutch expertise helped to construct the City and the stock exchange. Until recently, the British royal family was overwhelmingly German in blood and oft en in preferred languag e as well. But surely, you might say, the determining factor in Britain's history is that it is an island, cut off from the Continent by the sea. On some occasions, this was indeed so; for certain minds, it is always so. But the sea is a highway as well as a barrier. Before the railways, transport by water was much faster than tr ansport by land. The most important impact of the sea on parts of Britain was not that it cut them off from the rest of Eu rope, but rather that it allowed regular and substantial contacts with it. Just think of the close maritime, trading and cultural links between the Orkneys and Shetlands on the one hand and Scandina via on the other, or be tween East Anglia and the Dutch. Even now, Norwich has no direct air link with London, but it has o ne with Amsterdam. Historically, it makes little sense to generalise about "Britain" and "Europe" as though they are o r ever were monoliths. Over the centuries, different parts of what is now Britain had different rel ations with different p arts of the rest of Europe - and different relations with each other, too. Wales was only incorpora ted and given representation at Westminster in the 16th century. Scotland had its own parliament be fore 1707, which it reg ains in 1999. The Irish had their own Dublin parliament until 1800. Without detracting from the imp ortance of the Westminster parliament, then, it is simply not the case that it represents a thousan d years of exceptional British constitutional development. For parts of Britain, Westminster's centrality is a more recent phenomenon. Viewed this way, devolution is less an innovation than an overdue recognition of diffe rences within these isl ands that have always existed. What of war and empire? These indisputably helped to knit the different parts of Britain together. But did they also drive it apart from Continental Europe? As with the sea, it depends how you choos e to look at it. Mariti me empire was something the British had in common with many other European states: at various times , the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Danes, the Belgians, the French and above all the Spanish, whose A merican empire lasted l onger than Britain's did. Imperialism was not something that distinguished the British from other E uropean powers. What was distinctive about Britain's empire (for a century or so) was its sheer siz e. But Britain was never free to choose a global rather than a European role. In the past three centur ies, there has only been one major war in which the British have fought without significant Contine ntal European allies; o nly one major war in which the bulk of the Royal Navy ventured outside European waters; only one ma jor war in which the British were defeated. In all three cases, the war was the one with the Americ an colonies. From that conspicuous defeat, the obvious and correct moral was drawn. Britain, even at its most powerful, co uld not attempt a global role without first consolidating its position in Europe. It had first and foremost to be a Europe an power, because otherwise it could not be powerful anywhere else. None of this is intended to discount or deny our distinctiveness. But our particularities are no bi gger, no more momentous and no more deep-rooted than those of our European neighbours. Is Britain m ore different from Spai n, another composite state and one-time empire, than Spain is from, say, Denmark? Why should it be supposed that Britain's particularities point it away from the rest of Europe, when Denmark's and S pain's can (with some e ffort) flourish within it? And why anyway should difference in itself, whether within Britain or wi thin Europe as a whole, necessarily dictate separation? Why should it be supposed that a constantly renegotiated and strug gled-over union, whether it be the British Union or the European Union, should require homogeneity among its participants? There is no sound historical case, as we have seen, for arguing that Britain has evolved invariably in isolation from, or at odds with, the rest of Europe. Yet it would be foolish to deny that Euros cepticism, even Europho bia, has a long pedigree in these islands, on the left as much as on the right. Sometimes, it has t aken the form of a suspicion of what William Cobbett called "Continental entanglements", a fear tha t European involvement can only result in expensive wars. Very often, in the 18th and 19th centuries, it took the form of a belief that our constitution was uniquely free, and that the Continent was a pit of despotism by comparison. And sometim es it has been mere isolationism. As Winston Churchill said of Stanley Baldwin: "He knew little of Europe, and disliked what he knew." For the most part, these early Eurosceptics were unsuccessful. As Cobbett frequently complained, ho wever much people like him railed against Continental entanglements, the British remained persisten tly entangled. Geograph y and self-interest gave them little choice. And even those politicians who boasted most chauvinist ically about the peculiar glories of Britain were often cosmopolitan in practice, because once agai n they had little choic e. Lord Palmerston, that quintessential Victorian prime minister, was called "the most English mini ster"; but he spoke several European languages, was fully at home in the great European capitals an d devoted most of his c areer to European affairs. By contrast, postwar Euroscepticism has not always been well informed about the rest of Europe and has sometimes appeared shrill and anxious. It has acquired its particular tone from the second worl d war and from the mome nt encapsulated by David Low's famous and genuinely moving cartoon of a British soldier standing fi rmly on these islands raising his fist to a Nazi-dominated Continent, and declaring "Very well, alo ne!" It is understandab le that those who fought in the second world war, or lost family and friends in it, were marked by it for life. But it is often those too young to have been directly affected by the war whose vision has apparently been ma de most rigid by an image of it. To some extent, their views are based on fear, suspicion and jealousy of Germany. They hold to the idea that Germany, after its unification in 1870, was characterised by a kind of original sin that makes it inevitably the hammer of the Continent. But that view is now discredited among reputable historians. The belief t hat Britain and Germany are natural antagonists is equally unhistorical. As Paul Kennedy has shown, there is a longer hist ory of collaboration and mutual understanding. Indeed before 1914, many British politicians and pun dits argued that Germany was our natural ally. Eurosceptic views of Britain's relations with the United States can be equally selective. Only rece ntly, Paul Johnson suggested in Forbes magazine that Britain, or at least England, should actually become a part of the US . We can apparently hope to make up at least five states, and possibly even breed an American presi dent. I find it strange that people who claim to be worried about our independence from Brussels ar e apparently so eager t o surrender it entirely to a country 3,000 miles away. I find it even stranger that these same people, whose affection for the United States I do not doub t and indeed share (I lived there for 18 years), seem to have such a restricted knowledge of what s ort of country it now i s. The US is no longer overwhelmingly made up of, or led by, our English-speaking cousins. I come back to my point that Britain was never the only European power with an overseas empire. The Dutch had settlements in America. So did the French. So, above all, did the Spanish. And the rapid growth of the Hispanic population in the US, as well as its Asian and black populations, is something that many Britons, I think, st ill do not fully apprec iate. As anyone resident in the States will tell you, the Spanish language and culture are increasi ngly important there, and not just in states with historic links to the Spanish empire, such as Tex as and California. Even my own former East Coast base, Connecticut, which was once a British colony, now issues all its pu blic notices in Spanish as well as English. For many reasons, 21st-century American governing elite s will be much less Eur opean in background, outlook and style than earlier generations. And many will feel closer cultural and emotional ties with Spain than they do with this country. This does not necessarily mean the contraction of the close alliance with Britain. But it does make it imperative that we approach the alliance in a hard-headed, observant and flexible fashion. We s hould be wary of puttin g all our eggs in one transatlantic basket. It is sometimes suggested that Britain's historic links with the US, plus our receptiveness to American popular culture, mark us out from the rest of Euro pe, that we occupy a sp ecial mid-way position between the States and the Continent. These claims rest more on wishful thin king than on solid evidence. The Atlantic is over 3,000 miles wide; the Channel at its narrowest point is just 21 miles wide. In many respects Britain is not like America at all: in its National Health Service and many of its a ssumptions about welfar e, in its attitude to capital punishment and gun control, in its treatment of the environment, in t he sports it plays most and in many other ways, Britain resembles its European partners far more th an it does the American s. True, Britain also has features in common with the US, particularly in law and politics. And we are drenched in American popular culture. But this does not distinguish us from other parts of Europe as much as some imagine . I have already mentioned Spain's close and dynamic links with the modern US, but I could equally well have cited the important links between France and America. It was, after all, France that enab led the Americans to wi n their independence from Britain in the first place. It was France that helped to design Washingto n, and France that gave New York the Statue of Liberty. America and France are sister republics, th eir histories and polit ics inevitably intertwined because the revolutions that created them came so close together. And France, like virtually every other western European state, is as fond of American popular cultu re as Britain is. Jacques Delors himself loves US jazz, US films, US baseball. He even works with a poster of Citizen Kane behind his desk. None of this, to put it mildly, prevents him from being European. Other European countries besides Britain have their special relationships with the US - all of them different. These do not prevent them from also seeing themselves as European, any more than being European prevents them from also being assertive nation states. Britain needs to develop a similar confident political amb idexterity. We are not mid-Atlantic. But why shouldn't we look positively and creatively across the Atlantic from a secure position within Europe? Because, some would argue, Britain, like America, holds fast to certain democratic values and pract ices that cannot flourish within the European Union. Our constitutional values, according to this v iew, naturally make us far more comfortable in an American alliance than in "Europe", which has different political tradit ions. I accept that the Westminster parliament has a distinctive and distinguished history, a point frequently acknowledge d by Continental Europeans from Voltaire to Delors. I accept, too, that, as recent events have made all too clear, the European Commission and the European Parliament need reform, greater transparen cy, and a more secure b asis in popular consent. What I dispute is the vulgar notion that informs a great deal of media com ment and even parliamentary debate, that our Continental brethren are somehow inherently less democ ratic than we are ourse lves. Again, a selective memory of the second world war, and of Nazi tyranny, has clouded our judgement. Historically, it is simply not the case that Britain has invariably been more democratic than the C ontinent. Quite the rev erse. It is estimated that, in 1914, only 18 per cent of adults in the UK were enfranchised. Most o f the men and all of the women who struggled for our freedom in the first world war had themselves no freedom to vote. Thi s was not only unimpressive in itself, it was unimpressive by European standards. In 1914, Switzerl and, Sweden, Serbia, Norway, Italy, Greece, Germany, France, Finland, Bulgaria, Belgium and Austria all had wider franchis es than Britain did. Indeed the only European state which was even less democratic than Britain in 1914 was Hungary. The significance of this goes beyond the historical: it has implications for politics now. Traditio nally, Britain has been precocious in evolving stable and effective representative institutions. It has also been strident in celebrating its free constitution. But its record in extending citizen rights is not so impress ive. It may be the case, as Delors generously remarked, that the British "have the best journalisti c debate, the best parl iamentary committees, the best quizzing of prime ministers". In these respects, we have much to con tribute towards Europe's better governance. But in safeguarding citizen rights and in broadening de mocracy at every level, we may have a lot to learn from other European states. I repeat: Europe is not and never has been a monolith against which Britain can plausibly or useful ly be contrasted. Acknowledging this, and all that it implies, is not just essential if we are to e ngage positively and cl ear-headedly with the rest of Europe, it is also indispensable if we are to renovate Britain succes sfully. As Timothy Garton Ash has pointed out, much of the so- called European debate has in fact b een a debate about Brit ain itself. But I am optimistic that the current changes in Britain's governance, far from leading to break-up, will help us. Whoever wins next Thursday's elections in Wales and Scotland, it seems clear that the new Scottish Parliament, like the new Welsh Assembly, will support a more pro-active role within Europe. In the past, the so-called peripheries of these islands played a major part in forging Britain. So, now, Wales and Scotland may play leading parts in encouraging their English neighbours to come to terms with Britain as part of Europe. Just as our long paralysis over "Europe" derived in part from uncertainty over Britain itself, so these fresh solutions to our own internal diversity may create a new confidence in our dealings with our Continental partners. I believe that a renovated Britain can contribute a great deal to a new Europe and get a great deal back in return. And to understand the ultimate rationale for an effective and renovated European Union, you only have to look at Yugoslavia now and then look back again to our long past. Precisely 120 years ago, William Gladstone described what he saw as being Britain's abiding interest: to "strive to cultivate and maintain . . . to the very utmost, what is called the concert of Europe; to keep the powers of Europe in union together. And why? Because by keeping all in union together you neutralise and fetter and bind up the selfish aims of each." The writer is professor of history at the European Institute, London School of Economics. This article is based on a lecture at a recent conference on "new Britain", organised by the Smith Institute with the "New Statesman" and the LSE <<First, they have to change the name of the language to "American" -- a simple recognition of a dmeographic imperative {we got four times as many people}. This is what we ought to do over here anyway. The subject of the following article ought to know. A<>E<>R >> From http://www.thenewrepublic.com/magazines/tnr/current/aaron052499.h tml MAY 24, 1999 ISSUE THE HERO MYTH Hello to All That by Daniel Aaron Harold Evans, English-born journalist, editor, publisher, and self-described "immigrant" to the United States, is one of along line of trans-Atlantic commentators who have been looking at Americans (often down their noses) for several hundred years. In 1956, Evans came to the States on a travel grant that allowed him to criss-cross the country and to watch a nation, including its black and Native American minorities, during an election year. Some time later he became an American citizen, fascinated "with the idea of America and its unceasing struggle to achieve its ends." Such a statement hints of Manifest Destiny and National Mission; but the extraordinary burgeoning of the United States, as Evans tells it, had less to do with divine condescension than with a conjunction of happy accidents, historical and physiographical. The majority of Americans, he thinks, adhered to the gospel of "freedom" and "democracy" even when they did not practice it. What they "honored" were "the expectations of prosperity." The American Century might be said to be a triumphalist reading of the country's "second century." If so, it does not scant the testimony of the defeated, the scorned, and the oppressed, or predict clear sailing for the Ship of State. Evans's Americans are ingenious, brave, flexible, and pragmatic; they are also avaricious, hubristic, and full of "just plain chutzpah." The "saving grace" of American society is its stubborn faith in the future, its restlessness, and its "organic optimism" that never "quite" congeals into complacency. Not a "history," not a conventional chronicle or a disinterested random survey, and not at all a textbook, The AmericanCentury is first and foremost an illustrated political essay, a set of tableaux or choreographed historical episodes designed to introduce "new Americans" (and presumably old ones) to the years when the United States exfoliated into an international power. It is also a decade-by-decade account of selected events and people--not just the names enshrined in our national annals, but also those of the now near-anonymous men and women long dissolved into our culture and institutions. Finally, it is a story written without hokum or bias by a "new" American of his adopted country's political development from the end of the Civil War until it had become "the-most-powerful-country-in-the- world." The "plot" of Evans's narrative might be boiled down to something like this. America's second century opens with the last great land rush, a stampede into the Indian Territory and the finale of a "perpetual land boom" that was in process for the preceding sixty years. (Evans calls it a "typical American triumph, fired by relentless optimism and self-righteousness, and sustained by an infinite talent for gadgetry.") God's clients--the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, the Morgans, and so on- -had begun to harness America's industrial and financial energy, and by 1896 they had crushed the last serious agrarian revolt. In the course of its stumbling but irresistible momentum, the nation almost inadvertently acquires an empire. New immigrants, now largely from southern and eastern Europe, fuel the factories and plants and in the process transform urban politics. It is the age of the "Boss." "Class war" heats up as the industrial machine roars and sputters through financial crises and depressions, through two hot world wars and a long cold one, and through an unending spate of social convulsions. Although distracted by its political scandals and imperialistic adventures, by Vietnam and Watergate and the rest, by its racial phobias and its ubiquitous Yahoos, the nation is strong and resilient enough to survive its blunders. At the end of its first 200 years, although not cocky or unaware of its vulnerabilities, it takes its freedom and its prosperity pretty much for granted. In fifteen chapters, Evans has chronologically spanned the century and arranged his cast of characters who made and rode the historical waves. Each chapter is introduced by a ruminative essay on a prescribed topic. Collectively, these essays are a digest of the narrator's guided reading (replete with quotable remarks, substantive and decorative, by scholars and public intellectuals on his wavelength) and his views on the "enduring themes" in American political and social history. Like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., one of his respected sources, Evans is more comfortable in the "vital center" than on the wild ideological frontiers--and, one suspects, more averse to hard-core right- wingers than to political antinomians and cloud-cuckoos. Yet he wears no political badge and rarely tips his hand. Sometimes it is hard to tell why he allots more space to one subject or person than to another, why (to give one example) the "American Mussolini," Al Capone, should bulk larger in his history than the politically potent "Radio Priest," Father Charles Coughlin, even though Capone was the more photogenic and the more legendary of the two. Still, Evans's vignettes of nineteen presidents fit neatly into the structure of the narrative and are deftly done. Popping up like signposts on the American Century highway, they stretch from the relatively obscure Benjamin Harrison ("underappreciated," Evans says) to George Bush. Bill Clinton is waiting in the wings when the curtain drops. None of them escapes at least a soupcon of censure, and none is invidiously contrasted with a predecessor or a successor. Evans can be trenchant and flip. Theodore Roosevelt "talked loudly, but he carried a small stick." Wilson "could not bear friends who took a different view on the big issues. They were judged morally corrupt." "It was a frail presumption that while Coolidge dozed, the invisible hand of the marketplace was sorting everything out." Hoover "seemed incurably suspicious that if his fellow countrymen were given a helping hand they would turn into sloths." "It was bewilderingly his [Franklin Delano Roosevelt's] style to take a step forward and a brisk step back." Truman "had the good will but not the imagination, and the odious Stalin had neither." "As well as the smile, there was a profane vocabulary and a volcanic temper that Ike himself feared." Kennedy "had no intention of letting marriage curb his compulsive womanizing." "But Johnson's style, bred in smoky caucuses, was to obtain a consensus from a tightly knit group of power brokers, and then to sell the public the most palatable version." "It was always Halloween in the Nixon White House. They were continually spooked by leaks." Ford was "dogged by a press image as a klutz who stumbled on staircases and ski slopes." "Under Reagan the normal creative tension of democratic politics often seemed like a set of parallel lines doomed never to meet, wandering out into cognitive dissonance." It says something about Evans that while observing the 1956 election from Adlai Stevenson's bandwagon, he should find himself "unaccountably" cheering for Ike, and that for him the only titans in his presidential procession are the two Roosevelts, with Teddy clearly his favorite. The most remarkable feature of The American Century is the artful synchronization of its written text (historical commentary, biographical essays, captions, boxed inserts) with its visual text--a composite of cartoons, maps, drawings, and photographs (particularly the last) that complements the former like a musical score. Pictures of regional scenes and historical episodes, of politicians, judges, farmers, businessmen, gangsters, churchmen, soldiers, reformers, labor leaders, evangelists, policemen, and radicals punctuate the narrative flow. Quite a few must have been chosen because they shock, or are comically incongruous, or make strong political statements, or intangibly illuminate an occasion. Here is William Jennings Bryan on a lecture platform in 1896--at 35, he is not quite the "boy orator" but still theatrically handsome and charismatic. In 1913, a high-steel man balances himself sixty stories up on a narrow beam of the unfinished Woolworth Building, symbol of America's sky-assaulting temper. Five Roman Catholic clergymen, tough and confident soldiers of the Church Militant, stand (circa 1913) on the steps of St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York City, reviewing a parade. Two black men hang from a tree in Marian, Indiana in 1930, as a not- unpleased crowd of men and women, young and old, mingle decorously below the swinging corpses. Twenty-three-year-old Ronald Reagan, modeling for a University of Southern California art class, stands in shorts improbably poised to throw a forward pass. A dowager in furs, right out of a Peter Arno cartoon, glares at John L. Lewis as he walks past her, regal and aloof, in 1949. Dean Acheson, his face twisted with anger and embarrassment, is trapped in an elevator with his grinning nemesis, Senator Joseph McCarthy (circa 1954). The killers of Emmett Till (1955) smile complacently after their predictable acquittal. Betty Friedan (1963) dusts a bust of Abraham Lincoln ("my oldest hero"). In a Miami restaurant, Muhammad Ali, recent victor over Sonny Liston, looks impishly up at Malcolm X, who is snapping a picture of him (1964). President Johnson looms like an impending avalanche over a recoiling Abe Fortas (circa 1964). A grubby Billy Carter, the president's brother, drinks a can of beer in his grubby gas station (circa 1977). Evans chose these and other photographs from the thousands gathered over twelve years by his "infinitely resourceful" collaborator and photography specialist, Gail Buckland. They concur, she writes in her acknowledgment to the regiment of archivists and curators who supplied her with materials, that "photography is not only a dynamic means of visual education but also a vital source in comprehending history," and that their book is a "marriage of texts and photographs, each having equal weight and power." Words and images do interact synergistically in The American Century, and the photographs are more than merely documentary. They can be the equivalents of bitter editorials, as in Lewis Hines's astonishing study of the faces of four child-workers employed by the Pennsylvania coal company in 1911. They catch prominent people without their masks, sneak in sly social observations, make people ridiculous, tell jokes, blow life into the dead. (Scattered through the twenty-two-page bibliography are candid snaps of presidents from Taft to Clinton tossing out or catching baseballs, the easy motions of Eisenhower, Ford, and Johnson in contrast to the prim and awkward deliveries of Coolidge and Nixon.) Photographs of this kind, technically good or bad, can gloss and vivify a text, but they are just as slippery and prone to manipulation as words, and no less susceptible to willful distortion. The size and the heft of The American Century, and its lavish pictorial display, might suggest that it was designed for coffee tables. In fact, it is the work of a very knowledgeable journalist and a very good writer who has studied the land, consulted a gamut of advisers, read a lot of books, and then drawn his own chart of America's "ebbs and flows" during its second century. He calls this distillation of selected personalities and events a "history for browsers," and he invites them to dip into or break out of the narrative at any point in his many hundreds of pages. It might also be described as an essayistic chronicle of American society and politics written with a few rhetorical flourishes, and as a brief for the author's adopted country. Evans is a fair-minded if not a completely impartial historian. Far from glossing over discreditable moments in the nation's history--in Emerson's phrase, its "mumps and whooping coughs"--he makes them sound as American as apple pie. The kaleidoscopic society that he scrutinizes is open and hedged, philanthropic and materialistic, peaceful and violent. Evans neither dwells upon nor reconciles these contradictions, if such they be, any more than he tries to rub off the spots on the national escutcheon. He writes of endemic jingoism and "racism," of the crimes against Native Americans and black Americans, of the "pillaging" of the public domain, of creeping urban decay and the deterioration of the school system, and of the ever-widening gap between rich and poor. Yet running parallel to these blights are mini-stories about men and women, many of them obscure and forgotten, whose civic heroism is redemptive, and who must be reassessed, he writes, if we are to understand "how we have shaped our history." The American Century begins and ends with a sonorous affirmation: the country that "sustained western civilization by acts of courage, generosity, and vision unparalleled in the history of man" will endure "while freedom lives." All the same, there is a whiff of the jeremiad in Evans's sermonical conclusion. Indeed, the last five chapters of his history (they cover the cold war, the civil rights movement, Vietnam, Watergate, and the "Reagan revolution") show the republic in its worst moments and its finest moments. His doubts and his reservations are not explicitly conveyed, for he has no ax to grind; but throughout the narrative--in sum, the story of shifting political groups together with the lives of individual figures who collectively incarnate his "America"--he has been admonishing and passing judgment sotto voce. By the time he takes up the administrations of Nixon and Reagan, Evans's writing has acquired a vibrancy and an edge less discernible in his account of their predecessors, who by comparison appear through a historical haze. Here his subjects are people and topics that he has not merely read about, and he is boldly injecting himself into the telling. His talents coalesce in his ambivalent impressions of the outwardly simple yet very elusive Reagan--over-estimated and underestimated, brave and cheerful, politically canny, mentally slipshod--and his "brittle" wife. (Brittle?) Anyone who reads through this thick encapsulation of a hundred years cannot but come away with a fresh perspective on the United States, and not simply those for whom ancient history begins about five years ago. At moments the book gives the impression of having been concocted and cobbled. Evans has not always digested the plethora of facts that his researchers have dug up for him, and sometimes he betrays his haste. No matter. His book is full of not easily obtainable information, and the writing throughout is spirited, uncluttered, and concise. The literate young will like its breezy colloquial tone and its untextbookish improprieties, and it will stimulate and provoke the historical-minded who have lived through a good chunk of his "American century," as it has stimulated and provoked me. Daniel Aaron is emeritus professor of English at Harvard University. 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