你寫的這篇

非常 thought provoking! 我爭取想想，然後也許過幾天再認真回帖。（也許要到這周末，要是周末沒有回，那確實是瑣事太多，沒法靜心寫）

6，7年讀過一本書the American Spirit, 是曆史學家David McCollough寫的。曾讀過幾本他寫的曆史人物傳記，非常讓人尊敬。想到這本書，是因為你在文裏提出來的美國文化裏麵“活得比別人更好的自由”

McCollough從美國曆史發展的角度來分析，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."

再比如這段話，我也特別喜歡：

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，我這個回帖匆匆寫的。要是近幾天可以找到時間，我爭取認真寫點這個話題下的體會