gemini://midnight.pub/posts/1249
"On growing up in old places"
As an American born and raised, this isn't too far off. I remember seeing tombstones from the Revolutionary War era (I think this instance was 1784 or 1783), and thinking "Man. This graveyard has existed in some form or another for two and a half centuries. Wow! This is about as old as it gets!"
This fairly myopic sense of "oldness" comes easily, especially since the western US doesn't really -have- "American" history up until the mid 1800's, if that; native histories and traditions abound and ostensibly go back many hundreds of years, but don't leave nearly as many visible traces as you might see of indigenous or previous civilizations in Europe. You've got the original 13 Colonies area of the United States, all up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and that's as old as we get. At all. Any earlier French or British history around Canada, or Louisiana, or along the Mississippi, was subsumed into the history of the United States and doesn't carry much gravitas at all.
There really isn't an accurate comparison per @contrarian on that post. Europe is orders of magnitude older and it shows. We've scarcely begun to lay the bones of an American pseudo-empire that will be dug up by curious passersby and tourists centuries from now. Said bones probably by then would be buried in the sovereign soil of a totally different country, making totally different history, in a totally different state of mind.
For Europe, that's seemingly par for the course. That's just a Tuesday. Next major dynasty, please!
For the American continent, such a wide-spanning rise-and-fall has only happened once en masse, if you count the European colonization efforts over two centuries leading to the downfall of whatever other factions and nations originally laid claim to the land.
Crazy stuff, man.
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