Word: kammen
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...fascinating and magisterial book Mystic Chords of Memory (Knopf; 864 pages; $40), Michael Kammen explores the complicated relationship between history and memory that has existed since America began. What Kammen sets out to do is both modern and old-fashioned: through a careful mustering of detail and theory, he explains that throughout American history, facts have been transformed into myths and myths transformed into beliefs. From the time the Pilgrims may or may not have celebrated Thanksgiving to the "grotesque distortions" of Western history in TV shows like Gunsmoke, Kammen shows how America has reconstructed its past to conform with...
Mystic Chords of Memory suggests that we think of ourselves as a people who honor the past but are not imprisoned by it. Kammen claims that Americans have always believed they knew more about their own history than they actually did. Although we prefer to regard ourselves as a forward-looking people striding into the future, we tend to be happier sitting around the cozy fireplace of nostalgia...
...Kammen, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1972 book, People of Paradox, focuses on three periods: the half-century after the Civil War; the years between the First and Second World Wars; the decades since World War II. At the risk -- or rather with the certainty -- of distorting Kammen's subtle and teeming narrative, one can say that America has evolved from a society that repudiated the past to a culture ambivalent about it, to a nation that has turned wistful and retrospective...
...Michael Kammen...
...framers, the more fluid interpretation of the courts and a sort of glowing gas perceived by the public. That last Constitution, misquoted, rhapsodized over and construed to endorse the passions of the moment, is the subject of this imaginative book by a Pulitzer-prizewinning Cornell University historian, Michael Kammen. Kammen rummages through two centuries of sources, including news clippings, speeches, textbooks and public opinion polls, to gauge how Americans have regarded their own charter of government...