Worst Decade Ever?
Ron Brownstein
National Journal
Updated: September 2, 2011
What has been the worst 10-year stretch in American life?
It’s a timely question as the nation approaches the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. This grueling decade surely stands among the nation’s most challenging.
For this exercise, I’m not confining the assessment to chronological decades—the 1850s, say, or the 1960s. Instead, I’m looking at any consecutive 120-month period and asking: Which of those 10-year interludes have been the most difficult for America?
Most historians would look first at the Civil War. And a good place to begin there is on May 30, 1854, when Franklin Pierce signed the misguided Kansas-Nebraska Act. That statute lit the fuse for the war by repealing the Missouri Compromise and instead allowing each new state to vote on whether it would permit slavery—an invitation to division.
(More here.)
National Journal
Updated: September 2, 2011
What has been the worst 10-year stretch in American life?
It’s a timely question as the nation approaches the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. This grueling decade surely stands among the nation’s most challenging.
For this exercise, I’m not confining the assessment to chronological decades—the 1850s, say, or the 1960s. Instead, I’m looking at any consecutive 120-month period and asking: Which of those 10-year interludes have been the most difficult for America?
Most historians would look first at the Civil War. And a good place to begin there is on May 30, 1854, when Franklin Pierce signed the misguided Kansas-Nebraska Act. That statute lit the fuse for the war by repealing the Missouri Compromise and instead allowing each new state to vote on whether it would permit slavery—an invitation to division.
(More here.)
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