The superior power, status, and affluence of the United States led many to conclude that progress had indeed shown to be an accurate interpretation of the world's development. That also seemed to confirm the American view of history as progressive universal emancipation in a novus ordo seculorum. Historiographically that view had its expression in the consensus school with its affirmation of a basic unity, stemming from centuries of collective experience and a stable set of shared ideas and habits. The emergence of doubts about progress in America would come in the late 1960s, a time in which the prominence of structural postmodernism's prominence was fading quickly. Hence, postmodernism remained a predominantly European affair. Nevertheless, it was an important cultural current that shaped the historical thought of many contemporaries but also witnessed postmodernism as a phenomenon that was not restricted to the postmodernist variety prominent in the decades on either side of the recent turn of centuries.