skopia
Americans tell themselves a story of innocence, abundance, and invincibility. The South knew defeat, poverty, and the guilt of slavery, and Woodward offers that history as the corrective a superpower needs.
Hofstadter strips the myths off American statesmen from Jefferson to Franklin Roosevelt and finds one propertied creed underneath. The Emancipation Proclamation, he writes, had all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading.
Full of Emerson, a Harvard student goes west and finances a buffalo hunt into a hidden Colorado valley. The killing lasts weeks, the winter shuts them in, and nature stops being a consolation.