One day this past January, Mary Kim Titla's parents left their home on the San Carlos Apache Reservation in southeastern Arizona and drove across the desert to Phoenix with a single purpose in mind -- getting an up-close glimpse of a long shot named Barack Obama.

"This man," they told the little boy, "is going to make history."

Across the republic, we're hearing it everywhere in recent months, weeks and particularly in the days since Barack Obama became the presumptive Democratic nominee: In America, people say, the winds of history are blowing. And many are excited.

Last week, history became a buzzword. Jon Stewart mashed up clips of pundits rhapsodizing about history lessons. "Historic Choice: Obama," trumpeted the Richmond Times-Dispatch, one of many. "Barack Obama enters the history books," enthused CNN anchor Tony Harris.

"This is one of the most significant moments in American history," says Francine Childs, who in July 1956, at 14, sat at a Dairy Queen window every day for 30 days until she was served ice cream at the whites-only counter.

Obama is the most obvious historical figure. But he, John McCain and Hillary Rodham Clinton have each spent months vehemently rejecting the old ways, promising that change is at hand. Each has professed to be the one to maneuver us through what they all call a pivot point in history.

"America, this is our moment," Obama said last week as his winning delegate count became apparent. "This is our time -- our time to turn the page on the policies of the past."

But historic moments have everything to do with history -- both what has happened in the past, and the instant or era when things change. And each of the major candidates this year is deeply connected with some unhappy aspect of our past, and the urge to move on.

For Barack Obama, it is the American tradition of racial discrimination -- and finally hurdling it. For Hillary Rodham Clinton, it has been gender inequity -- and the promise of a woman in the White House. For John McCain, it is the legacy of Vietnam.

In American history, certain years -- 1776, 1865 and 2001 among them -- have revealed themselves as obvious crossroads. But not since 1968 have we had a presidential campaign and candidates that summon so many of the fundamental tensions of our history.

So it's worth asking amid the sense of wonder: Is this election year a pivot point? When we talk about making history, can we really ever learn from our yesterdays? Are there lessons from the past for the candidates to carry into the fall campaign and the administration beyond?

"The past is never dead," William Faulkner, one of America's greatest writers, once wrote. "It's not even past."

And so it is in America in 2008. We are riding history's unpredictable currents -- no matter how passionately we want to move on, no matter how much control we think we have, no matter how loudly our would-be leaders insist that tomorrow is where our priorities lie.

Triumphant history

What is happening in American politics this year is linked, in the oddest of ways, with Commonwealth of Kentucky Death Certificate No. 26469, a bare-bones account of the Nov. 4, 1930, gunshot murder of a 60-year-old "colored" carpenter named Ed Doneghy.

"Ed Doneghy Killed at Louisville Polls," the Chicago Defender, a black newspaper, reported a couple of days later.

Today, the Rev. Martin McMickle, 59, of Shaker Heights, Ohio, cannot stop looking at the smeared ink of the words on that death certificate. When McMickle was doing his family history several months ago, he learned of his link to Doneghy and followed up. He found out that the man was killed for trying to register to vote.

And in August, 78 years after a lethal gunshot at a Kentucky poll felled a man who wanted to vote, Doneghy's relative, Martin McMickle -- minister, teacher, civil rights activist -- will travel to Denver as a delegate to cast a vote for Obama as the Democratic nominee for president.

A pivot point in history? You bet. And not just because of Obama's triumph, either. To McMickle, this is a historic moment because of Clinton and McCain, too.

On Clinton: "I'm also mindful that my mother, who was born in 1914, was born into a country where women did not have the right to vote."

On McCain: "The whole idea that a person who is a senior citizen but has the energy and the vigor to sustain so far the primary campaign and is on the verge of beginning the general campaign says an awful lot about senior citizens and about when people ought to consider their active life has ended."

"So," McMickle says, "I think there's a wonderful biography in all three of them that can be instructive for the broader public: voting rights for African-Americans, voting rights for women in America, and the importance of people continuing to live long beyond the artificial time lines of 65 or 70."

This sense of something special afoot -- with Obama emerging last week as the most visible engine, but also including the other firsts of this unusual primary season -- is part of why people who have had their own brushes with history feel a sense of it right now.

"We have had candidates who are not well known. We've had candidates who are African-American. We have had women. We have had a public which is disaffected from politics. But we've never had them all together. And in that sense, I think that makes it historic," says Natalie Davis, a political scientist who ran for the U.S. Senate in 1996.

Paul J. Matthews, a retired pharmaceuticals executive in Houston, has seen history and studied it. And he puts Obama's achievement in a very personal context.

In 1967, Matthews was a college student, a black man marching in a green ROTC uniform on a Prairie View A&M campus fired up by the battle for civil rights. He began to wonder about his choice to serve a nation that continued to treat blacks like second-class citizens.

He resolved his doubt by combing through books on military history. There, he found two paragraphs about the famed Buffalo Soldiers -- the black regiments formed in the wake of the Civil War, comprised of men determined to show their worth as Americans.

It changed his attitude, and Matthews shipped off to Vietnam two years later. He logged 11 months, 29 days in a medical battalion, where he tagged the bodies of war dead and wrote notification letters to their families back home.

Today, Matthews runs the institution he founded: the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum, a place where people discuss not only blacks' experience in that war but the larger issue -- how American blacks over the centuries have served a system that scorned them. And now ...

"I'm so elated that starting from a situation where blacks couldn't serve in the military to the possibility of having a black man as commander in chief. ... That's quite a leap," he says. "If that's not a teachable moment, we'll never have one."

That's what history provides, says David Anderson: tangible, valuable tools for us all. It offers reserves of strength for a candidate, particularly one like Obama, who owes it to America to be a man of color rather than downplaying his race, Anderson says.

Anderson, 78, the great-grandson of an Alabama slave, spends his days portraying Frederick Douglass, the iconic 19th-century abolitionist, in Rochester, N.Y. History, insists Anderson, is not a burden. Just the opposite.

"You don't leave it behind," Anderson says. "It is NOT baggage. It is strength and it is essential knowledge. And the more you have of it, the better you can understand who you are and what you're capable of."

After visiting West Africa several years ago, Anderson decided to add something to his name -- "Sankofa," a word from the Akan language that translates loosely to "go back and take." Anderson interprets it to mean this: "Retrieve from the past that which you can use to frame the future."

Learning from history, in other words.

Uneasy history

History, of course, can be a burden. Because the past is not even past. It's still with us.

Most prominently, Barack Obama faces the heritage of three torturous centuries of racial unease and injustice -- and continuing racism in some quarters.

For months, Hillary Clinton grappled with the benefits and detriments of being a female front-runner. John McCain faces a nation increasingly obsessed with youth and detached from military culture that wonders whether, at 71, he can govern robustly -- and how relevant his Vietnam POW experience is to today's discourse.

More generally, America and its past have always had an uneasy relationship.

We fashion elegies to a simpler, more unified and politically pure past yet often brush our real history aside in the name of an optimistic, forward trajectory that is part of the basic American DNA. We are quick with the word "historic," using it for everything from celebrity trials to new-and-improved snack foods, but rarely do we pause to consider what something historic really is.

The candidates don't always help, either.

"You see history abused so much in the political process," says Seth Masket, who spent part of the Clinton administration answering letters sent to the president and fashioning his written communication -- the written equivalent of a speechwriter.

"A lot of these historical metaphors are strained, a lot are inaccurate," says Masket, who now teaches political science at the University of Denver. People's relationship to history, he says, is visceral: "It's an exciting time to be alive, but it's also very scary. People who like the idea of tradition aren't sure what to cling onto anymore."

Then, there is the uncomfortable feeling that no matter what we do, we can't quite shake off the past. Andreas Killen, for example, surveys 2008 and sees 1973, all over again.

The themes in Killen's 2006 book, "1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol and the Birth of Post-Sixties America," sound familiar today: an unpopular president presiding over a divisive war; a country full of malaise and nervous energy trying to make sense of the civil rights and women's movements; rising gas prices, a faltering economy and an expanding unease about the government and the American message.

A generation later, every single item in that list weighs upon Barack Obama and John McCain.

"There have been many moments over the past few years when I've felt like we were reliving the early 1970s," Killen says.

The heritage of the early 1970s -- war, malaise -- could hamper the next administration "no matter how much of a mandate for change that president has," Killen says. History isn't always willing to let go.

Opportunities from history?

In the end, there is this, too: We are raising a generation less mindful of the American past and its messages than any that came before.

According to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, students can graduate from the nation's top 50 colleges and universities without ever taking a course in U.S. history. And the National Geographic-Roper Survey of Geographic Literacy found in 2006 that only 37 percent of young Americans can find Iraq on a map. A recent national news broadcast, showing a screen on the famed 1858 debates between Abraham Lincoln and Sen. Stephen Douglas, put up photos of Lincoln and ... Frederick Douglass.

"The baby boomers were forced as college students to take Western Civilization or to take American history. This new generation never had to do any of that," says Davis, who teaches undergraduates at Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama.

"These folks are in the moment. They cannot line up three presidents in the 20th century in terms of order," she says. "They are absolutely a historical. .... It's about them -- the world that surrounds them at that moment. And there's no looking back because they don't know what to be looking for."

And of course there is that niggling thing Americans have to deal with every day -- the ravenous beast called the present.

"We care about politics. On the other hand, we're not going to spend that much time worrying about it," says John Hinshaw, a historian at Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania. "We're worried about $4 a gallon gas and what's going on in our kids' lives. It's intensely interesting to certain groups, but a lot of it is just not what we do all the time."

And yet ... there are times when Americans make history, or at least appreciate that they are witnesses to it. Times like 2008.

"The United States of America is an extraordinary country," Condoleezza Rice said at the State Department the other day, reacting to the flurry of Obama news. "It is a country that has overcome many, many, now years, decades, actually a couple of centuries of trying to make good on its principles. And I think what we are seeing is an extraordinary expression of the fact that 'We the people' is beginning to mean all of us."

That means the Rev. Martin McMickle, staring at a death certificate that chronicles an injustice and preparing to rectify it in some small way. It means Paul J. Matthews and David Anderson, preserving parts of the American past that they believe must be remembered.

It means Mary Kim Titla, whose parents journeyed from the reservation to see Obama. Two decades ago, she became the first American Indian TV reporter on the air in Arizona. This year, she is campaigning to be the first American Indian woman ever elected to Congress.

And it means Francine Childs, the black girl at the Dairy Queen counter who grew up into a student activist, professor, author, world traveler. "Did I ever think this would happen?" she says. "It was something I'd always dreamed about, but [I was] never sure I would see that dream fulfilled."

Is 2008 shaping up to be a historic crossroads? It's always difficult to judge from within; in presidential election years, history is never far away and "historic" flows easily from the lips.

But this is, most certainly, a teachable moment -- for the candidates and for the people they presume to lead.

In a country defined by fast-forward but never all that adept with rewind, it's a chance to move ahead with real change -- not merely to leave our national scars behind but to fashion ways to carry them with us. An opportunity to show that we can do more than lose ourselves in our own history; we can find ourselves there, too.

• Contributing to this report were AP National Writers Pauline Arrillaga, Allen G. Breed and Adam Geller and AP Writer Meghan Barr.

EDITOR'S NOTE -- This latest chapter of "The Measure of a Nation," a yearlong series of multimedia story packages about the presidency and the 2008 election as seen through the prism of the culture, explores the role history plays in the campaign -- both for voters and the candidates themselves. Comments on Measure of a Nation can be sent to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it