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How do you size a (pole of) civilization/culture? Is the US the same US as 200 years ago and not a new something on the same place? At what point do they diverge? Some slice it even further e.g. Woodard's American Nations or Garreau's Nine Nations, which each have separate genesis etc. It's turtles all the way down, and we can do cluster analysis etc. So which is the most useful lens? I'm asking where to draw the line and apply morphological breaks a la Spengler.
I believe just a short jump through time brings us to alien worlds, besides across geography. The modern cannon/idea space has basically nothing in common with that of the 18th century (most of someone's reading in 1750 would not have been what we care of now from then.) I don't think I live in the same civilization as Alexander Pope or Schiller, let alone Boethius or Lucretius. Were Lomonosov and Voltaireneighbors; is Pelevin my neighbor?
Now, there are different frameworks for this, Spengler e.g. excludes succession, while Toynbeee considers parental links, but...
Short, short time jumps. I'd be curious to correlate answers to the question about the USA over the past 250 years, with their answers to two questions:
When did Rome end?
Do you think that your father approves of you and your life?
The first is obvious. Do you think of Flavius Aetius before riding into battle against Attila, reflecting on himself as part of a Roman tradition that reaches back to Scipio; do you hear that and think "You absolute fool, don't you realize that the post-Marian reform legions were a completely different thing, and the imperium again, and the dominate yet again?"
The second, I'm curious to what extent the personal is the political. I have an older father, he was in his late 40s when I was born, and so many aspects of my world are inexplicable to him. Nonetheless I feel that he loves me and approves of me and my life. I suspect the feeling that the Founding Fathers would not approve of the modern USA because of it's inexplicability is related to an observation or feeling of rejection by one's biological ancestors.
As for my answer: I don't think that America has ever exactly been one thing. There are visions of America that failed, and visions of America that succeeded. The Founding Fathers were not, by nature, factionalists or followers, they were individualists to a fault. There were at least a dozen views of what America would be among the signers of the Declaration and the Constitution. Some of the Founders expressed different views at different times, and probably felt different ways at different times. It is hard to imagine that Thomas Jefferson had a consistent view on race when one reads his writings on the subject.
My view is more along the lines of how do you define a dynasty in sports, as long as you have consistent success and players who played together with other players, you have a single team. The break comes when you have bad seasons or you have a complete turnover in personnel. So the 1920-1964 Yankees constitute a single Dynasty, even though no single player could possibly span that period, and the game itself changed so much in that time. Because you never had discontinuity, Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra played with Joe DiMaggio who played with Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth. It wasn't until the down years that you see discontinuity.
Similarly, the Trump admin is a big change from the Bush II admin, but there are a lot of guys who served in both, and you can push that back through every Republican admin (and parallels in the Dems) to the start of the century, and probably earlier. Over time the population of the country has turned over, is demographically different, but there's direct succession. As long as that exists, there's America, and I think some of the founders would look at it and smile, at least some of the time.
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Good definitions refer to clusters in thingspace.
The US is a political entity which is quite clearly defined.
US culture is a bit more vague. Obviously culture changes over time, and obviously time is continuous, so often there are no neat joints where one can carve up reality and say "here phase A ends, and phase B begins". (One exception is the upheaval of a political system, which makes a great joint to carve. "Nazi Germany" vs "Post-WW2 Germany", "Tsarist Russia" vs "Soviet Russia". Alas, the Northern US has no such cut in its past.)
So one might consider "US culture in the early 21st century" something which labels something useful in thingspace. Of course, if one zooms in more, one finds that this is not a neat gaussian sphere, but that this cluster has a rich inner structure along a lot of dimensions. Rural, Pakistan, gaming, metal, Mid-West, campus, software, Catholic, gay are all words which you can insert into "___ US culture in the early 21st century" to build something which likely points at a useful cluster in thingspace.
I am with you that the past is a foreign country. Culturally, we have more in common with the median Chinese urbanite than we have with a countryman from 1850.
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I find that questions along the lines of "Is [X] an instance of [Y]?" are rarely helpful, and attempts to answer them pretty much always devolve into No True Scotsman'ing and other arbitrary redefinitions of [X] and [Y]. Usually there is some deeper question that better expresses what I really want to know, and I would be better served by finding a way to articulate it. This view of mine probably crystallized when I was reading a lot about the Byzantines online and waded through endless "But were they Romans or not??!!" threads. Who cares? Just admire the Hagia Sofia and stop looking for joints to cleave when reality hasn't provided you with any.
So if your question is "would a time traveller from the 18th century find the present an alien place?" the answer is self-evidently yes, even if we just gave them a stack of modern books to read by candlelight without exposing them to any advanced technology. If your follow-up question is "would such a person be so horrified by what they read that they would return to their timeline and immediately try to prevent us from coming into existence?" the answer is quite possibly still yes, but their pre-Reformation ancestors would have thought the same of them. If your question is "do we have a right to claim the name and symbols of our forefathers when they were so different from us?" I point you to China, which any Chinese person will be proud to tell you is 5000 years old, and that they are one and the same civilization as those illiterate, human-sacrificing, neolithic tribesmen of five millennia ago. Compared to that, 300 years is nothing.
As for I would divide things up, on a political basis there have been three Americas: the America of the Founders, ending with the Civil War; the America of Lincoln, after which I would place an interregnum between 1945 and 1965; and then the current America, which is in the process of being dismantled. On a cultural basis, there is a clear break in the mid-20th century, but I do not detect one in the 19th century, at least not in literature. From the point of view of the rest of the world, there is before 1945 and after. Draw enough of these lines and you will see that many of them overlap, and then you can choose to name the things on either side of them whatever you want. As for regional cultures, those were significant in earlier times, but are losing their strength in favor of a more general rural-urban divide.
The more American history I read, the more I think this is a misleading concept. The way I see it is that the Founding Fathers didn't found America - both in the sense that America already existed (founded by the Pilgrim Fathers et al.) and in the sense that the United States established in 1789 wasn't a nation-state.
The Founding Fathers were founding a sovereign state (in the technical international law sense of that term) that was itself a federation of sovereign States (in the sense of the States in 1789 being separate free self-governing political communities). They were building political institutions, and in order to do so they deliberately punted on three questions that go to the heart of "what is America as a country?" The first is the slavery question, which we all know about. As it turned out, America couldn't remain a country without resolving that question, and I don't think that would have surprised the founders. The second is the democracy question. The 1789 Constitution deliberately doesn't establish a right to vote - the founders were agnostic as to whether the republic they were establishing would be democratic or oligarchic. But by the Jackson administration the fact that America is a democracy is part of the national identity and rolling back universal white, male suffrage would be unthinkable. And the third was the religion question (both in the sense of "Is America a Christian nation or just a nation where the population happens to be majority-Christian?" and in the sense of "What does it mean to be a Christian country when you are committed to neutrality between mutually excommunicate Christian denominations?"), which America is still successfully punting on.
Semi-serious troll opinion - the United States of the 1789 Constitution was an artificial political entity with a similar nationhood deficit to the modern European Union. It became a country as a result of the Monroe and Jackson administrations.
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I would say that if talking mathemathics - the f(USA) was smooth until the summer of love and then there was a breaking point.
Why would 2020 be a discontinuity and not, say, the Civil War (or the Civil Rights era or the Great Depression or...)?edit: misunderstanding, though I don't know that it radically changes my point
I think your point still stands even with the misunderstanding. It's hard to envision a good argument that any amount of civil unrest in the last century was worse than open warfare in the 19th.
Because the idea that the students and not the troops were in the right at Kent state was a break with the past.
In WWII you weren’t allowed to oppose the war effort- nor in the civil war. Tories in the revolution weren’t in a great spot either. The Great War is the reason we don’t have a large German speaking minority anymore. Etc, etc.
In the North you had copperhead southern sympathizers, including legislators who were openly trying to gum up the works of the war effort. One of them even shot the President. You also had the New York Draft Riots of 1863, the largest and deadliest civil disturbance in American history.
In the South you had a draft dodging rate higher than Vietnam, an organized armed uprising against the Mississippi government, and a big chunk of Virginia seceding from the mother state and rejoining the Union. You also had areas like Maryland and Kentucky that were effectively neutral and who’s loyalty were only controlled by which side had troops in the state.
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I think you misunderstood - the op was talking about changing character. The losses and wins of the Russian Empire didn't change its character. The october revolution did.
And something changed in the early 70s. It is slow moving and was interrupted by the peace dividend of the 90s. But it is changing.
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I believe he's referring to 1967, not the Summer of Floyd.
That would make significantly more sense. I'd gotten too used to people sarcastically calling June 2020 that.
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I think if you’re talking about continuity, I think that it’s a case of saying “if I took someone from the previous era and dropped them into the after era, would they be shocked by the changes. Would George Washington be shocked by how government works in 1865? What about Lincoln dropped in 1965? Would JFK be shocked by how government works in 2065? And so I think we’ve had 3 republics in America and more in Britain which went from pagan Rome to Christian Rome to Anglo-Saxon pagan, to Christian Anglo-Saxon, to Norman, to Manga Carta, to Empire, to post Empire, to what appears to be the beginnings of Islamic Britain. If you take a British man from Rome and drop him in any era after they’d be shocked by the changes.
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