By Francis X. Maier, The Catholic Thing - The late great Henry Ford famously argued that “history is bunk.” The past, so the reasoning goes, is a millstone around humanity’s neck, a depressing, Old World obstacle to progress. And that’s clearly one of the conceits buried deep in the American psyche. We Americans are different. We’re a “city upon a hill,” the kind mentioned in the Sermon on the Mount. We’re an entirely “new order of the ages” – words, in their original Latin, that are stamped right on our nation’s Great Seal.