Imagine, if you will, a meeting between Gertrude Stein and Henry Ford at a cocktail party – an unlikely pairing, to be sure, but not an inconceivable one for two people born within eleven years of each other and dying a year apart. The conversation turns to America, specifically American history. Stein responds, as she did in The Making of Americans (1925), with authorial effusiveness: “It has always seemed to me a rare privilege, this, of being an American, a real American, one whose tradition it has taken scarcely sixty years to create. We need only realise our parents, remember our grandparents and know ourselves and our history is complete.” Ford, concurring, reacts with assembly-line efficiency: “History is bunk.”

Ford was wrong, of course. Yet no less so was Stein. Assuming a generation to consist of twenty years, and subtracting the three generations of Americans that she cited from the year that her words appeared in print, one afrives at 1865 – shortchanging America of its past by almost ninety years of independence and by over two hundred years of European settlement. The more grievous error in Stein's remarks has little to do with chronology, however. Rather, it concerns the relationship they posit between having a history and having historical consciousness, making the historical sensibility of a nation's people dependent upon their nation's age in years. Viewed with respect to other countries in the world, which is the perspective from which Stein's comments are made, America is a young country, one whose history as a settled land dates back only to the early seventeenth century.