At the beginning of the modern age, Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, seeking a shorter trade route to the Eastern lands, but discovered North America instead. Although he never understood the significance of his discovery, it changed the world forever. The story of America is inspiring and fascinating, yet few today comprehend its rise, struggles, triumphs, leaders, and what made it a land of hope.
Wilfred McClay’s best-selling book tells America’s story, helping readers see the big picture and revealing invaluable, meaningful lessons. I highly recommend the book to parents of middle and high school kids. This is a great book to read as we approach America’s 250th birthday in 2026.
McClay is a master historian who believes history contains valuable lessons that support a healthy patriotism and responsible citizenship. In this book, he focuses on America’s political history from colonial times to the present. He writes engagingly, avoids partisan politics, yet is open about his belief that America was and is a land of hope.
The author does an excellent job explaining major events and their causes and effects in ways that delight and reveal. He explains what led to European settlement, and he continues into colonial America, the Great Awakening, the founding, the Civil War, the World Wars, the Depression, and the Cold War. The Louisiana Purchase, the Monroe Doctrine, Reconstruction, modernization, the Progressive Era, the civil rights movement, and Vietnam are also covered.
One of the book’s greatest strengths is its treatment of America’s leaders. He interposes stories of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and many other presidents. He also shares about lesser-known American leaders who played a significant role in America’s story.
Some of the most interesting and helpful parts include chapter 3 “The Revolution of Self-Rule”, chapter 7 “The Age of Democracy” (where he describes the significance of Alexis de Tocqueville’s political and social analysis of America in his famous book Democracy in America), chapter 8 “The Old South and Slavery”, chapter 12 “A Nation Transformed” (about the Civil War’s aftermath), and chapter 14 “The Progressive Era.”
Land of Hope is suitable for teenagers who want to understand the time they find themselves in, what is happening around them, and what role they should play.
In conclusion, here is a quote that McClay used to emphasize the importance of history:
Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today. We need to know what kind of firm ground other men, belonging to generations before us, have found to stand on. In spite of changing conditions of life they were not very different from ourselves, their thoughts were the grandfathers of our thoughts, they managed to meet situations as difficult as those we have to face, to meet them sometimes lightheartedly, and in some measure to make their hopes prevail. We need to know how they did it.
In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generatoins gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking. That is why, in times like ours, when old institutions are caving in and being replaced by new institutions not necessarily in accord with most men’s preconceived hopes, political thought has to look backwards as well as forwards.
John Dos Passos “The Use of the Past,” from The Ground We Stand On: Some Examples from the History of a Political Creed (1941)
