Additional information
by Wilfred M. McClay (Author), John McBride (Author)
This Teachers' Guide to Wilfred McClay's Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story will be an invaluable aid to classroom teachers who use Land of Hope as a textbook for courses in United States history. McClay has coauthored the Guide with John McBride, a master teacher with over thirty years of secondary and collegiate teaching experience. The result is an exceptionally rich and useful resource for the enhancement of the classroom experience. Each chapter of Land of Hope has a five-part treatment: a short summation of the chapter's contents, a lengthy set of questions and answers about the text of the chapter, materials that can be deployed in testing or used to sharpen classroom discussion; a set of short objective tests, suitable for quizzes and exams; a primary-source document for class study and analysis; and questions and answers to accompany the document. In addition, there are special units to assist teachers in the giving special coverage to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Origins of the Two-Party System. Like Land of Hope itself, these materials are designed to help students come away from the study of the American past with a coherent sense of the larger story, and a sense of history as a profoundly reflective activity, one that goes to the depth of our humanity.
Author Biography
Wilfred M. McClay is the G. T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma and the Director of the Center for the History of Liberty. His book The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America was awarded the 1995 Merle Curti Award of the Organization of American Historians for the best book in American intellectual history. Among his other books are A Student's Guide to U.S. History, Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Policy in America, Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Human Person in the American Past, and Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity, and Civic Life in Modern America. He was appointed in 2002 to membership on the National Council on the Humanities, the advisory board for the National Endowment for the Humanities, and served in that capacity for eleven years. He is a member of the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission, which is planning events for the nation's 250th anniversary in 2026. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Academy of Education. He is a graduate of St. John's College (Annapolis) and received his PhD in History from the Johns Hopkins University.
John McBride was educated at Rice University (BA 1968, MA 1971) and the University of Virginia (PhD 1977). He taught high school (mostly US History AP) in Chattanooga TN from 1974 to 2010, at the Baylor School and David Brainerd Christian School. He has also taught as an adjunct for the past 25 years at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, in political science and in history. For the past six years he has taught (as a volunteer and most recently as an adjunct for Georgia State University) at Walker State Prison, which is Georgia's character-and-faith-based prison. He enjoys employing a wide variety of teaching methods, including games, trivium-style debates, and group projects.
