Our forefathers created a nostalgia industry that fictionalized our recent past, turning Daniel Boone and Buffalo Bill Cody into living celebrity-hero artifacts and reenactors of the frontier days, in the nineteenth century devouring James Fenimore Cooper’s romantic stories of the untamed eighteenth century. Walden was driven by Henry David Thoreau’s nostalgia for the era of his childhood in the 1820s and ’30s, before railroads and the telegraph, and his dreamy wish “not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century.” As that century turned into the even more
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