Read the following passage from historian Eric Hobsbawm's book on the twentieth century:
The destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link one's contemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late twentieth century.
Most young men and women at the century's end grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in. This makes historians, whose business is to remember what others forget, more essential at the end of the second millenium than ever before.
— From The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991
©1994 by Eric Hobsbawm.
Think about what Hobsbawm is trying to say in this passage. You may have to read it a couple of times to fully understand the meaning. Then, using your own words, restate the ideas from the paragraph:
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