First Paragraph:
Nations are made up of people but held together by history, like wattle and daub or lath and plaster or bricks and mortar. For a generation, American history has been coming undone and the nation has been coming apart, the daub cracking, the plaster buckling, the mortar crumbling. This tragedy was foreseen.
—Jill Lepore. “This America: A Case For the Nation.”