well, first, i want to thank the new america foundation for having us. i am particular and very honored to be a moderator because up until now, this late date in my career, no one s ever found my moderate enough in my views to be a moderators. [laughter] i m really happy tonight, the first time i like to moderate a panel, and it s, obviously, a great honor to talk about this on the 50th anniversary, and, obviously, it s a book that has put this bark on the culture and it s a very, very rare book that makes the argument that it changed people s lives. it s under criticism for affecting a group of small people for not talking about working class women who had no choice but to work all along and not talking about people of other sexual preferences finding themselves askew or outside conventional life. what i want to do today is talk about the ongoing power of the classic, and i recently taught this book to the undergrads at nyu who some of a couple here in the audience who d
dispair. in his american assumption, there was a version of the creed of exceptionalism that scholars came to regard as uniquely american, escaped from the rise and fall of history and universal opportunity for individuals, endless progress for the nation, and yet split historical second in the heat of radical reconstruction, they maintained that the american assumption was temporarily counterbalanced, alarmed by the return to congress in 1866 of unreconstructed southerners who might repudiate the civil war debt and almost certainly reduce the national tariff, they characterized northern industry has frightened and moving towards the stand which abolition democracy had already taken, namely temporary dictatorship, endowed negro education, legal civil rights, and eventually votes for negroes to offset the southern threat of economic attack. the american assumption was from radical reconstruction whether it was special order number 15 # giving emancipated slaves possession thei