"The caring was a necessary myth, an eagle like   

A speck in heaven dives."-The History of America, Alicia Ostriker

The poem, "The History of America" affected me much more deeply than the other poems that we read in class.   I felt like it warned against an America that's still trying to expand and find new horizons.
Each part seemed to allude to a specific point in America's History.  With lines like: "Its language alters,no account varmint.." I found myself thinking of a colonial explorer, of Lewis and Clark or Davy Crockett.  It seemed to speak of uncharted places, a frontier that has not been found yet.  This resonated with me because of the idea of Americans looking for the next new thing, the uncharted territory.  Someone drew a comparison to the (wonderful) book Into the Wild, and I could not agree more.  It's what Alex McCandless/Supertramp was looking for, a bold new place, untainted by man, wild and free and beautiful.
However, the poem goes on to talk about that lack of new land.  Railroads get put up, "[America] Keeps moving. Behind it, a steel track. Cold, Permanent."  We start to kill off the wildlife, Native Americans die, everywhere becomes more developed.  In short, as we lose places to expand to, we lose our identity.
With the line I quoted above (which is just amazing.  The syntax makes me so jealous) we get the idea that we pretend to care about things, when really we're just seeking new places.  By having caring be a necessary myth (which reminded me of the City Upon a Hill speech from John Winthrop) we're really talking about how our whole nation seems lost without somewhere new to be.  We "absorb and project children" making them in our image, but we don't really know what that is anymore.