The world has changed.

“The message in The Lord of the Rings is, in a way, that the struggle to destroy the evil also destroys the good. The very effort to mobilize against the evil unalterably changes what you’re trying to defend. So at the very end of that trilogy, the heroes — Frodo the Hobbit, Gandalf and Elrond — sail away. They can’t live in this world that they’ve created, because it’s so different from what they started out to defend. It’s a metaphor; Abraham Lincoln didn’t sail away, he was killed, but the world after the Civil War was not Lincoln’s America anymore.” By way of a friend in the program, Columbia’s Eric Foner picks his five most personally influential books, and guess what made the list…