Wilfred M. McClay

*Part of my "A Year Through American History" project*

In celebration of America's bisesquicentennial, I've decided to spend the year reading through American history. I decided to start with McClay's Land of Hope because it is both an excellent and accessible overview of the subject and I appreciate his method of doing history. One might just as well have started with reading his epilogue at the end of the book, a brilliant little reflection on American patriotism that reminds us that show more history is, and will always remain, a humane study. For we are dealing with humans, with all their glory, all their limitations, all their faults. No amount of technological or material progress can transcend our human nature. We remain "social creatures," bound by time and space, and longing for the things that make life worth living.

In this way, McClay reflects many elements reminiscent of Herbert Butterfield-the preeminent Cambridge historian who critiqued Whiggish interpretations of history and its tendency to devalue the power of human personality to shape the course of events even while it pronounced moral judgment on them. McClay is not silent about the darker parts of America's story. Yet, he remains ever charitable to its characters, reminding us that humans are tragic figures. We strive for the good but are bedeviled by our own cupidity and the historical conditions which bind us. Our forefathers are, in that way, not all that different than us. May we be judged with more grace than we have judged our predecessors.

McClay identifies a couple specific threads in America's story which he sees as being woven throughout her history. There is, of course, the meaning of the Union from the time of the Founding to the Civil War. In what way were states independent but also united? That tension would define America for nearly a hundred years. What about America's relationship to the rest of the world? How to be a friendly ally to other freedom-seeking peoples without entangling ourselves in imperialism was a question that plagued America, especially as she grew stronger in the twentieth century.

Somewhat related, and on a larger scale, there are the universal principles to which America aspires in her founding documents. These, in some way, bind up the whole of human history in the success of the America experiment. And yet, the story of America is one in which those universal principles are lived out among real people in a specific place. As McClay says, "This quality of particularity is, in its own way, a different kind of universal. It is simply the way we are, It is part of the human condition and is something that we share with the peoples of nearly all other nations. It is universal precisely because it is not universalistic, just as the love of one's own parents or one's family or one's spouse is universal precisely in its particularity" (427). This distinction is crucial if we are to properly understand America, her history, and her people. show less

Author Wilfred McClay set out to write a narrative account of American history that was both honest and inspiring. I think he has done both beautifully in this easy-to-read flyby of American history from the founding (and somewhat before) to roughly modern day. I learned some important new things about America’s history and perhaps equally important, have a list of follow-on books to dig deeper, not the least of which being biographies for Washington, Lincoln and LBJ.

I read this book in show more conjunction with a video teaching series led by McClay for Hillsdale College called The Great American Story: A Land of Hope. This course is highly recommended and is available free of charge on the Hillsdale website. show less

This is a very brief guide to U.S. history. It is from a series by a frankly conservative but the content is not highly polemical. The opening 20 pages or so are an extremely general discussion of the nature and value of history in general with very little reference to the U.S. I liked this both for nits philosophy and its writing style. Then there are some chapters about how American history in general can be approached. The last broad section, "Windows" does give brief descriptions of show more specific themes in U.S,. history -- frontier, liberty, etc. The only regional one is "the South" --I should think "the West" also deserves one in terms of the basic American historical myths. Some of the book choices are more polemical than the overall tone of the writing --Whittaker Chambers' Witness as a book every student should read, for example. I think it is a valuable source for the early Cold War era, but not one of the all-time greats. His section on capitalism also leans heavily toward the pro-capitalist side. The only anti-capitalist book he mentions is Josephson's The Robber Barons, and while it is fair to say that is outdated, it is hardly the last word from that side of the argument. show less

Started off slow, but became more interesting. Overall, it's too philosophical for my taste. It was assigned reading for my US History class and while I did learn some things, I felt like I was reading a philosophical/sociology text. Definitely not what I expected. However, for someone majoring in History, I can see its worth.