He even noticed that our ongoing linguistic practice rejects treating something's merely being a shared past practice as automatically making it right.
Carol Harper, founder and owner of a Boston-based media strategy company, added: "There's something about a shared past; we all know exactly where we're coming from.
Unlike most regions in the world, the common underlying theme that permeates through South Asia's major urban centers including Colombo, Delhi, Dhaka, Karachi, Lahore, and Mumbai, is a shared colonial past.
It became untenable, and I get all the reasons why it became untenable, but I think we suffer as a citizenry to not have that, because what gets done in its place is pretty terrible and corrosive and partisan and people tell all these tales about the past and there's no way to dispute them or engage in a deeper way with them, because there's no sense of a shared past.
"I thought that the general reading public needs an ambitious, sweeping account of the American past... because there's no sense of a shared past," says historian Jill Lepore.
A narrative was conceived that constructed a shared past and a shared future for Europe's citizens.
"The focus on Africa as the source of a shared past is replaced with a wider look at the cultures of the African Diaspora as well as pointing to what's present in African-American culture today," she said.
Although family words are often funny, they're also shorthand for moments from a shared past and as such carry an emotional resonance.
A group of wistful, unfulfilled people with a shared past are reunited at a wedding where they loudly air their sexual dissatisfactions and existential fears.
But here in the ruins of El Atatra, perhaps the biggest damage has been to any memory of a shared past and any thought of a shared future.
