ABSTRACT
In many ways, the history of the United States is often taught in the form of crisis reaction anecdotes. Most textbooks focus more upon the dire emergencies of the nation’s existence than the everyday lives of ordinary American citizens. Thus, a typical survey text will devote multiple chapters to the deadliest American wars, each of which lasted four years, and only a handful of pages to periods of domestic and international tranquility.1 This is unsurprising, and reflects the tendency of American citizens to focus much of their attention upon the crisis of the moment, whether it is local or international in scope. Modern US media outlets devote a majority of their coverage to crises and responses, and if a crisis does not exist, a relatively minor issue can be trumpeted as a call to action, a means to rally the public and, at the same time, take in massive amounts of advertising dollars. This strategy pays enormous dividends for the major media providers, which in the twenty-first century must feed a rapacious public desire for constant information and updates. A failure to treat every incident as world-altering merely leads to a lower audience rating – the more sedate approaches to news delivery have haemorrhaged consumers to the sensationalists for more than a century.
