I'm not interested in current events per se, but I am interested in how certain aspects of social or public life that might seem ultra-contemporary actually take their place in a long American continuum.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
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.
In terms of the class structure that you see so much in European portraiture, I don't think one feels that in America in the 21st century. But we have these other kinds of social structures now, like celebrity, who establish new hierarchies.
We live in a world which is changing very fast. What seems contemporary now will be historical in two years.
There is a long and successful tradition of popular movements in the U.S. and elsewhere having an impact on crises in forgotten places.
It was through the private world of family that the public world of politics came alive for me: living in intimate proximity with people for whom larger questions of ideology and belief, as well as issues relating to politics and governance, were vivid daily realities.
New York has been the subject of thousands of books. Every immigrant group has had its saga as has every epoch and social class.
The political currents that topped the global agenda in the late 20th century - revolutionary nationalism, feminism and ethnic struggle - place culture at their heart.
Since the middle of the twentieth century, our understanding of the American past has been revolutionized, in no small part because of our altered conceptions of the place of race in the nation's history.
American time has stretched around the world. It has become the dominant tempo of modern history, especially of the history of Europe.
Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just 'The Other.'
No opposing quotes found.