There is no arc of history.
By David Blight
***Today, Americans live in a country forged by Reconstruction and remade again by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the profound social movements that forced their passage. Pluralism and equality were born and reborn in those two revolutions, which took place a century apart. But the events of recent years, especially during the Trump era, serve as a reminder that no change is necessarily permanent and no law can itself protect Americans from their own worst impulses: racism, nativism, authoritarianism, greed. The past few years have revealed the potency of sheer grievance, whether born of genuine economic travail or ludicrous conspiracy theories. It should be clear to all now that history does not end and is not necessarily going to any particular place or bending in an inevitable arc toward justice or anything else.
Some of the convulsions of the Civil War and Reconstruction advanced the American experiment, and some set it back. Whitman worried that the “real war will never get in the books” and that its “undream’d of depths of emotion” and the “infinite dead” would be forgotten. His fear was misplaced: poets have chronicled the war and its toll, scholars have searched and found Whitman’s “convulsiveness,” historians have written its great and terrible story. Americans, however, have not yet solved the most profound questions the era left in its wake, and their country is now in desperate need of another remaking.
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