American Oracle Quotes

“Warren began his Centennial meditation with big claims about the place of the Civil War in American consciousness. Boldly, he called the war "the great single event of our history ... our only felt history, history lived in the national imagination:" Until the i86os, the nation's founding and growth had been only a "daydream of easy and automatic victories, a vulgar delusion of manifest destiny, a conviction of being a people divinely chosen to live on milk and honey at small expense." Warren's "nation" here was the exclusive, mainstream, "white" population and not blacks or Indians, whom he would represent in other writing as unpersuaded by that vulgar delusion. These were a poet's broad strokes, indeed, but he made his point: only with the Civil War did Americans earn an "awareness of the cost of having a history""
Warren”
― David W. Blight, American Oracle