Abraham Lincoln repeatedly tops polls as our greatest and most revered president. But few people thought so on March 4, 1865, when he took the oath of office for the second time.
To compare anything that has transpired in the past few years to this cataclysmic upheaval represents a spectacular lack of understanding about American history.
Rather than viewing memory as a passive process of recalling lived experiences as objective truths, historians have begun to view memory as an active ordering of the past.
“Inasmuch as bloody [conflicts] were the order of the day in those times,” their report read, “it is easy to see that each comet was the harbinger of a fearful and devastating war.”
