Cakes and Ale [antikvár]

INTRODUCTIONA Maturing NationA mericans are quick to believe that everything familiar about their lives is subject to constant change. Restless movement is their guiding image. America belongs to the New World, which, after all, is always being completed but never finished. This is a young country, it is sometimes still said, with its face to the future and its back to the past. Americans have always been ready to move on and start again. On the frontier, Tocqueville wrote, the American would build a house for his old age and move away before the roof was on. "We want to live in the present," said Henry Ford, "and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history that we make today." Such self-confidence is meant to run in the American blood. However daunt-ing the obstacle, Americans would roll up their sleeves to shove it out of the way. Where else, the histórián Eric Goldman has asked, would people joke: "The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer"?In its third century, is America so young, so supple, and so thoroughly forward-looking? After talking with several hundred Americans about their country and getting to know all its regionswe have traveled, between us, to all but a handful of the fifty stateswe think it is time to look through a new face of the prism. How modern is modern America? The many people we met, who were so generous with their thoughts and their time, live in a mature country, a mature economy, a mature society, with all the strengths and weaknesses the word "maturity" implies. Heirs, it seemed to us, more than pioneers,