Similarly, Louis Hartz, who sometimes disagreed with the Progressives, argued that Americans accepted laissez-faire capitalism without challenge because they lacked a feudal, precaptialist past.
The ignorant old woman who ruled for the entire last half of the nineteenth century did more than any other single person to hold back China's progress.
When you reflect on how far we humans have come from the prehistoric caves to mind-blowing technological advancements, you would feel the power of imagination.
Yet there is a dark side to this picture: despite our progress, half of the world's population still suffers, with water services inferior to those available to the ancient Greeks and Romans.
Indeed, in some ways it counts for more than when the Ottoman empire was crumbling a century ago and Turkey was widely known as the "sick man of Europe".
Two years before, a nationwide study of college graduates had shown that more than a third had made no significant gains in such mental abilities during their school years.
Not least among those advances were two 13th-century inventions: ships that could cross oceans, and guns that could shoot the people the sailors met on the other side.