Consuming The American Century: The Power Of The American Century

America, established in 1776, what started off as fleeting colonies of England has flourished into the most influential global power of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Yet along with the global powers of the past, America faces the conundrum of longevity. How long can the United States keep a hold of the power it has acquired? Or, has it already slipped though Americas grasp? This is the spark of debate between historians, social scientists, and writers alike. Many have tried to predict or forecast the demise of this power or even the likely hood of demise for such great power. Those who have tried to predict/forecast consisted of historian Emily Rosenberg and writer Henry Luce. Rosenberg claims that the American century has already

Rosenberg states that consumerism constituted the hallmark of the American century and ultimately became its undoing. She then narrows her focus on the mass consumerist society. She believes that the United States is growing into a culture of consumption she illustrates this when she says, “Mass consumption and mass entertainment fashioned an “American dream””. As stated before this is what Rosenberg believes is the undoing of the American century. The more we become this culture of consumption the more it will ultimately undermine American power and

Gaddis wants us to see the past as a landscape and the historian as the wanderer standing on a perch. He states, if you think of the past as a landscape then history is the way we represent it, what lifts us from the now and familiar to let us try to understand what we can’t experience directly. He believes that we gain from this view. We gain an understanding of our insignificant size compared to the landscape (the past) and with that recognition of insignificance we are aware that we will never recapture the entire past in our