Read the excerpt from a quilt of a country. once these disparate parts were held together by a common enemy, by the fault lines of world wars and the electrified fence of communism. with the end of the cold war there was the creeping concern that without a focus for hatred and distrust, a sense of national identity would evaporate, that the left side of the hyphen—african-american, mexican-american, irish-american—would overwhelm the right. what is the denotative meaning of fault lines in this excerpt? lines that are drawn when placing blame areas of defense in times of war long cracks in the surface of the earth breaks in modern american society?

Question: Read the excerpt from a quilt of a country. once these disparate parts were held together by a common enemy, by the fault lines of world wars and the electrified fence of communism. with the end of the cold war there was the creeping concern that without a focus for hatred and distrust, a sense of national identity would evaporate, that the left side of the hyphen—african-american, mexican-american, irish-american—would overwhelm the right. what is the denotative meaning of fault lines in this excerpt? lines that are drawn when placing blame areas of defense in times of war long cracks in the surface of the earth breaks in modern american society?

In this excerpt from "A Quilt of a Country," the denotative meaning of "fault lines" is areas of defense in times of war. The author uses the term to refer to the divisions between different groups of Americans that were held together during times of war, but may become more pronounced in times of peace. The fault lines were created by the common enemy and served as a means of defense during times of conflict, but they also represented a potential source of division once the external threat was removed.