I’d noticed that in so many ways, as Stephen Colbert joked on the first episode of his old nightly show, America had become increasingly “divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart.” From the 1960s and ’70s on, I realized, America had really changed in this regard. That’s how I came to write my last nonfiction book, a not-so-obvious American history called Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire. But other important historical arcs, more complicated or obscure, have to be figured out. The equality and empowerment of women is one of those big duh ones. Some of the arcs of historical change are obvious, their paths as well as their causes.
A half-century of life is enough to provide some panoramic perspective, letting you see and sense arcs of history first hand, like when an airplane reaches the altitude where the curvature of the Earth becomes visible. When you reach your fifties, it gets easier to notice the big ways in which the world has or hasn’t changed since you were young, both the look and feel of things and people’s understandings of how society works.
