We were an isolated, blank page of human history, says Mills.

Question: What forces have shaped America?

D. Quinn Mills: America is shaped primarily by two I think. Number one is it isolation. We are protected behind our oceans, and that is as true today as it is been before, we went through World War I and World War II without any significant damage at all to our homeland. Almost no other major country in the world--certainly none of the major countries Eurasia--did that and it really does shaped the way we feel about the world. The second thing is that we had, what is largely, because we are settled by immigrants and the mixture of the world, it’s a, we had a largely blank page on which to write and we are largely our own creation for good and bad, in a way that is simply not true of most other countries. I think of the Russians a great deal. There is a country; there is a group of people who have been invaded again and again and again, and it's a totally different culture as a result of that than is our culture. We’ve never been invaded essentially, except briefly by the British in two wars around the time of the Revolution. So, I think the isolation and the ability to develop ourselves as we saw fit are the two really important things.

Recorded on: 9/27/07