When the historian Stephanie Coontz published The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap in 1992, it landed like a gasoline-soaked rag in the middle of that era’s burning culture wars. That was the year Vice President Dan Quayle chided the fictional news anchor Murphy Brown for having a child “ out of wedlock ,” and Pat Buchanan, speaking at the Republican National Convention, denounced Hillary Clinton for comparing “marriage and the family” to “slavery and life on an