Hope from History

"The future was an industrial, urban America that these people had never, ever imagined. The Civil War was a triumph of the Republican Party, a sectional party with a very clear ideology: Lincoln's ideology. And here it is worth pausing to consider this is one of the few times where a section of the country has achieved such complete dominance over the rest of the country, and seems to have the ability to make its view of the world stand for an American view of the world. It is also one of the few times that a single political party has been so dominant—perhaps in 1804, perhaps in 1932. And it forms a kind of test case of the ability of both a section and a party to shape the country according to the view of the world. And they can't do it—not very easily."

"The Nation in 1865"
Richard White, Stanford University

http://www.humanitiestexas.org/news/articles/before-and-after-civil-war 

Hope for the next four years?