Erasing the Sixties — Or, Whatever Happened to Mark Rudd?

Americans do not meditate on History; they dream about fresh starts and wide horizons. We are an impatient people, pragmatic to our bones, eager to get on with the business of getting on. It is hardly surprising that our response to the cultural baggage of History has always been a preference for “traveling light.” At best, we see the Old through a glass, darkly.

I offer this thumbnail sketch of ahistoricity, American-style, less in a spirit of thrilling discovery than to suggest how potent the mythos still is. Some historians now have consigned the equation of America and Eden to the ashcan—as superficial, exaggerated, filled with more poetry than truth. But the illusion that American history is written on erasable ...