非常 thought provoking! 我争取想想，然后也许过几天再认真回帖。（也许要到这周末，要是周末没有回，那确实是琐事太多，没法静心写）
6，7年读过一本书the American Spirit, 是历史学家David McCollough写的。曾读过几本他写的历史人物传记，非常让人尊敬。想到这本书，是因为你在文里提出来的美国文化里面“活得比别人更好的自由”
McCollough从美国历史发展的角度来分析，比如
"Keep in mind that when we were founded by those Americans of the eighteenth century, none had had any prior experience in revolutions or nation making. They were, as we would say, winging it. They were idealistic and they were young. We see their faces in the old paintings done later in their lives or looking at us from the paper money in our wallets, and we see the awkward teeth and the powdered hair, and we think of them as elder statesmen. But George Washington, when he took command of the Continental Army at Cambridge in 1775, was forty-three, and he was the oldest of them. Jefferson was thirty-three when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. John Adams was forty. Benjamin Rush - one of the most interesting of them all - was thirty when he signed the Declaration. They were young people, feeling their way, improvising, trying to do what would work. They had no money, no navy, no real army. There wasn't a bank in the entire country. It was a country of just 2,500,000 people, 500,000 of whom were held in slavery. And think of this: Few nations in the world know when they were born. We know exactly when we began and why we began and who did it."
再比如这段话，我也特别喜欢：
History isn’t just something that ought to be taught, read, or encouraged only because it will make us better citizens. It will make us a better citizen and it will make us more thoughtful and understanding human beings. It should be taught for the pleasure it provides. The pleasure of history, like art or music or literature, consists in an expansion of the experience of being alive,”
嗯，我这个回帖匆匆写的。要是近几天可以找到时间，我争取认真写点这个话题下的体会
