American Views of the Past

Extract

Mostly, the past has been for men a strange country. Remote and inaccessible, its existence is accepted but not important. Known through the curious tales of occasional observers, it is meaningful only to the extent that it affords those who regard it reflected images of their own society.

The first Americans were little occupied with the past. Although they read history, and wrote it, it was the history of their own times; the term in the seventeenth century referred more often to contemporaneous events than to those that had receded out of the memory of living men. Indeed, in a universe in which divine Providence interceded directly in the affairs of men, there was little purpose to the quest for antecedents; behind every action was the same ultimate cause.