“ [T]he grandfather, or great-grandfather, of a high proportion of our population was not even in this country when the War was being fought. Not that this disqualifies the grandson from experiencing to the full the imaginative appeal of the Civil War. To experience this appeal may be, in fact, the very ritual of being American…To be American is not, as the Pole Adam Gurowski pointed out more than a hundred years ago, a matter of blood; it is a matter of an idea—and history is the image of that idea.
1.01.09
