CAN AMERICA PIVOT, OR MUST IT REMAIN STUCK IN AN EARLY 20Th-CENTURY MINDSET?

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War (New York & London: Norton, 2017) (From the "Author's Note": "In 1865, the United States was a beacon of liberty and equality to the world. It had fought a war to abolish human bondage, and Congress was committing to a reconstruction of the South that would enable millions of people who had been held as slaves to claim the rights and privileges of citizenship. The values that constituted the nation had new strength and clarity, animated by a government with n unprecedented capacity to make those values meaningful for every American. "Just thirty-five years later, in 1900, the possibilities of the prior generation had given away to an entirely different consensus. The government at every level was engaged in a vast project of sifting and sorting, of guarding the boundaries of unyielding hereditary privilege. Much of the country was consumed with separating the races--black, white, yellow, red, brown. This segregation was not simply physical or geographical. Citizenship itself was divided and tiered. Being an American had no unified meaning. The very course of a life--whether one could expect to survive infancy, go to school, learn to read, earn a living, and avoid arbitrary arrest, coerced labor, and sudden and violent death--depended on whether one was white or of color, man or woman, rich or poor, native or foreign born. The country's physical borders had become less places of entry than of exclusion, where the nation's integrity--often explicitly defined as its white purity--was guarded, secured, and maintained. At the same time, the United States transformed itself into an imperial power conquering territories from San Juan to Manila, driven by ideas of the white man's burden and a hard, racialized sense of manifest destiny. "The nation's pivot from emancipation to Jim Crow and empire set the terms for more than a century of conflict over the contours and substance of citizenship and the proper,size, scope and prepares of government." Id. at xiii-xiv. Food for thought? Sharfstein's implicit point may well be that, in 2017, America has not changed/pivoted. That race, gender, wealth, country of birth still remain defining characteristic of the kind of  'American life' one leads. The same issues of the turn of the twentieth century still divide many of us in the second decade of the twenty-first century: immigration (Trump's travel ban), gender (Trump's Mika Brzezinski tweet), wealth (Republicans proposed health care plan which is mean toward the vulnerable and generous--tax break--toward the wealthy), and race (Trump's comments on Mexicans both legal and illegal), etc.).