I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.
The truth is that all civic and social change is friction. Politics is friction. The only way you can bend the arc of history is to create that kind of friction, which is something that makes most people incredibly uncomfortable but which, for whatever reason, because of my upbringing or because of my genetics, is something that doesn't bug me.
I see history as really cyclical in terms of the intense idealism, and the desire to create a better life outside of societal norms.
Personally, my interest in social history ends around 1959, by which time I was an adolescent. I've always attributed this to my particular sensibilities. I like formality and elegance, and I'm fundamentally conservative.
As a child growing up in World War II, I was very moved and stirred by what was going on, but I distanced myself from history. I regarded history as just one more subject.
I was always interested in social change but never actually did anything about it.
I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passe abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.
Perhaps the most important lesson of the New Social Historians is that history belongs to those about whom or whose documents survive.
Yes, I'm a reasonably good self-taught historian of the 1930s and '40s. I've never wanted to write about another time or place. I wouldn't know what to say about contemporary society.
History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.