In May 2016, I published my book American Ways. A BehavioralHistory of the United States with Expectations for the Future with
Amazon. It was the culmination of
decades of studying and teaching American history. It was also a response to numerous inquiries
by foreign companies and students about why Americans act so American. I learned, for example, that the Japanese see
Americans as strange as aliens from Mars.
I also discovered that many Americans, both young and old, hold the
oddest notions of what did and did not happen in the American past.
I assert that there are some basic patterns in typical
American ways over four centuries of experience. Many of the conclusions drawn by the earliest
settlers have persisted to today and will likely survive in the future. As one case, the earliest colonists of both
Jamestown and Plymouth found out that the woods and fields of America did not
offer gold, such as the Spanish discovered in Mexico and Peru, but did offer
many opportunities for ambitious, optimistic, and hard-working people. American prosperity and democracy were
created through millions of individual efforts over some 20 generations.
I think our understanding of patterns in historical
American behavior and the ideals behind our actions provide some
well-considered expectations for the future.
Like everybody else, I cannot consistently predict specific events, but
I can recognize some basic trends and provide reasonable alternative outcomes
for them in the future. That is what I
will be doing in this blog.
The following questions that I will be exploring in this
blog include:
1. Are the
American people today headed for another civil war?
2. What do
immigration and trade policies have to do with international politics?
3. When will the
next Great(er) Recession likely occur?
4. How does the
consumer behavior of Millennials differ from that of Boomers?
5. Will the
elections of 2018 and 2020 be more about emotions or material interests?© 2017 Stephen M. Millett. All rights reserved.
No comments:
Post a Comment