American Oracle by David Blight (again)

“All human beings are wayfarers on a journey, and so are peoples and nations. They have countless moral choices to make along the way, and once those choices are made, and consequences sewn into the fabric of the story, it is best, this mighty book suggests, not to erase, avoid, or lie about the self-knowledge gained along the journy. But alas, frail humanity desperately needs its denials, its pleasing narratives, its self-justifying stories that make the past serve the present. In American culture, despite the efforts of some artists and historians, we tend to demand a redemptive history, often without knowing that we have erased the tragedy.”
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”Grandpa Penn was a lonely man (his wife had died many years earlier); he despised ‘progress’ and most things ‘modern,’ but he was a masterful storyteller. He told his grandson that only two good things had come from modernity: ‘window screens and painless dentistry.’”

-David Blight, 2011