Meaning and paraphrasing

I know it's a lot to ask, would you be kind and help me with this. I find it quite hard to understand !!!

The dramatic shift of cultural presentation between the Progressive era and the 1990s matches the chronology historian Michael Kammen has projected for the role of tradition in American culture. Since 1870, he has pointed out, the most significant role involved the deliberate Americanization of folk heritage through collected and presented narrative, speech, and song. Broadly speaking, what followed was an imperfect democratization in regions and occupations, and later pluralization in groupings of ethnicity, race, gender, age, sexuality, appearance, and class, to name some in the ever-growing list. Kammen also noted the influence of tourism on later uses of tradition, and Pennsylvania, with its whopping fifty-one separate tourist agencies, certainly attests to that trend in the state. Even more than attracting tourism, heritage-writing—indeed, a whole heritage industry—is being called on for purposes of “economic development,” to promote community pride and image. Judging from the meteoric increase in museums, magazines, and films on heritage during the 1980s and 1990s, and the leveling-off of American studies programs in universities, the production of American heritage knowledge comes increasingly from media and public agencies. If the 1980s reports on higher education are to be believed, the role for public agencies may be heightened by the diminishing cultural authority of the academy. At the same time, American cultural education by many public agencies in the 1990s is a frequent target of conservative criticism in an effort to scale back or re-devise governmental programs. One might now forecast a period in which American folk tradition is geared toward emotional community-building in order to deal with the role of individuals in a global mass culture, where electronic communication and constant mobility create a need for organizing belonging. That opens up the kinds of traditions—the kinds of communities and organizations, identities and rituals—representing the American memory of the past, the American perception of the present, to a tremendously wide array of possibilities for a mobile and electronically communicating society. Museums, books, films, and schools are scrambling to keep up. It used to be that Americans were preoccupied with the ways in which such institutions and the media reflected society's traditions. Now, and Shoemaker's building of the Pennsylvania mystique is a notable example, Americans have a view in which they see themselves as shaping traditions, or at least as defining what's important. Therefore, history is more than recorded; it is constructed. And folklore is more than collected; it is projected. In Pennsylvania, much of the mystique-building through folklore and history of the highland paradise seems to have worn off (and probably so has American romantic regionalism generally). Nevertheless, Shoemaker would be heartened to know that Pennsylvanians have retained their woods and their rustic traditions.