Watching From Here to Eternity yesterday reminded me of how miraculous Americans can be when they work together. One example of this would be the battleship California, sunk at her berth at the head of Battleship Row. These photos show her position a few days after, surrounded by repair vessels, trying desperately to keep California afloat, but she would finally sink and settle on December 10  You can see also the capsized Oklahoma and the sunken Arizona, with her bow blown away.

And here is California being raised from the mud at Pearl. She would not only be raised, but she’d be re-designed, repaired and put back into action by early 1944. Her lines (seen below) were far more beautiful than they’d ever been.

California had been launched in 1921; but even in her more ungainly interwar version, I found this photograph enchanting. Here she is passing beneath another American engineering miracle, still under construction: The Golden Gate Bridge.

It struck me how incredibly productive Americans can be—I looked forward every year to teaching my U.S. History students about 1930s bridge-building. But nothing demonstrated our productivity and ingenuity more than the civilian response to World War II, including the fabled “Rosie the Riveter” (women made up a third of the labor force).

The image that so vividly demonstrates this part of our national character is this photograph of masses of supplies being offloaded onto Omaha Beach shortly after D-Day. I think this is one of the most inspirational photographs in our history.

There is something else that reclaimed ships, bridges and wartime factories suggest, and that’s the capability of our national imagination, something I took for granted growing up when I would pad out into our living room, wrapped in a blanket against the cold, to watch a Mercury Program launch from Cape Canaveral. This is John Glenn, one of my Mercury heroes.

But the best example of this element of our national character–our imagination–didn’t come in wartime or in the New Deal years–and not even in the heady days of the seven Mercury astronauts. I think it came in 1956.

The largest work project in American history came in Ike’s time: The National Highway Act led to the construction of 41,000 miles of roads and generated hundreds of thousands of jobs. We proved once again that we could think big and build big.

And of course the Highway Act led to my life the way it’s turned out; when my father became the comptroller of Madonna Construction–he bid jobs up and down the state–that led to the family’s move from Taft to Arroyo Grande, my hometown.

I am sick of those who proclaim us a “failed country,” because they know nothing about our history. We don’t need them anymore than we needed Copperhead Clement Vallandigham or snake-oil salesman like Huey Long or Joseph McCarthy.

What we need to do is to remember who we are.