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Author McClay, Wilfred M., author.

Title Land of hope : an invitation to the great American story / Wilfred M. McClay.

Publication Info. New York, New York : Encounter Books, [2019]
©2019

Copies

Location Call No. Status
 Glastonbury, Welles-Turner Memorial Library - Adult Department  973 MCCLAY    Check Shelf
 Manchester, Main Library - Non Fiction  973 MCCLAY    Check Shelf
 Southington Library - Adult  973 MCC    Check Shelf
Edition First American edition.
Description xiv, 459 pages, 24 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color), portraits, maps ; 26 cm
Age group: age Teenagers lcdgt
Educational level group: edu High school students lcdgt
Gender group: gdr Men lcdgt
Nationality/regional group: nat Americans lcdgt
Occupational/field of activity group: occ University and college faculty members lcdgt
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 435-440) and index.
Audience Grades 9-12.
Contents Introduction : one long story -- Beginnings : settlement and unsettlement -- The shaping of British North America -- The revolution of self-rule -- A war, a nation, and a wound -- The experiment begins -- From Jefferson to Jackson : the rise of the common man -- The culture of democracy -- The Old South and slavery -- The gathering storm -- The house divides -- The ordeal of reconstruction -- A nation transformed -- Becoming a world power -- The progressive era -- Woodrow Wilson and the Great War -- From boom to bust -- The new deal -- The finest hour : World War II -- All thoughts and things were split : the Cold War -- Out of balance : the turbulent sixties -- Fall and restoration : from Nixon to Reagan -- The world since the Great War -- The shape of American patriotism.
Summary We have a glut of text and trade books on American history. But what we don't have is a compact, inexpensive, authoritative, and compulsively readable book that will offer to American readers a clear, informative, and inspiring narrative account of their own country. Such an account can shape and deepen their sense of the land they inhabit and, by making them understand that land's roots, and share in its memories, will equip them for the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship in American society. It will provide them with an enduring sense of membership in one of the greatest enterprises in human history: the exciting, perilous, and consequential story of their own country. The existing texts simply fail to tell that story with energy and conviction. They are more likely to reflect the skeptical or partial outlook of specialized professional academic historians, an outlook that leads to a fragmented and fractured view of modern American society and fails to convey to American readers the greater arc of their own history. Or they disproportionately reflect the outlook of radical critics of American society, whose one-sided accounts lack the balance of a larger perspective and have had an enormous, and largely negative, effect upon the teaching of American history in American high schools and colleges. This state of affairs cannot continue for long without producing serious consequences. A great nation needs and deserves a great and coherent narrative, as an expression of its own self-understanding; and it needs to be able to convey that narrative to its young effectively. It perhaps goes without saying that such a narrative cannot be a fairy tale or a whitewash of the past; it will not be convincing if it is not truthful. But there is no necessary contradiction between an honest account of the American past and an inspiring one. This account seeks to provide both.
Subject United States -- History -- Juvenile literature.
United States. (OCoLC)fst01204155
Genre/Form History. (OCoLC)fst01411628
Juvenile works. (OCoLC)fst01411637
Added Title Invitation to the great American story
Other Form: Online version: McClay, Wilfred M., author. Land of hope New York : Encounter Books, [2019] 9781594039386 (DLC) 2018046473
ISBN 9781594039379 hardcover alkaline paper
1594039372 hardcover alkaline paper
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