A Student's Guide to U.S. History

Don't be fooled by the lovely cover! This is NOT REAL American history! The author obviously has disdain for his subject and has totally rewritten the country's history from his own imagination. I'm very dismayed that this book has been provided to so many high school students. I'd return it but I have preferred to throw it in the trash so no one else gets ahold of it.

Don't let the small size of this book or its plain-Jane title deceive you. This guide bursts with insights and arresting metaphors. It's a compact but charged essay on American history with a very high intellectual punch-per-page ratio. The book falls neatly into two parts. The first six chapters of the Guide cover all the topics usually discussed in a seminar on historiography or the philosophy of history. Can history be a science? Is there "truth" to be uncovered? Do the times call forth leaders, or do leaders shape the times? Are institutions, beliefs, conventions, and values only "social constructs" in the service of power? How do fallacies and unstated assumptions shape historical writing? Which narratives become myths, and which myths shape narratives? Along the way, filiopietism, deconstruction, relativism, postmodernism, and American exceptionalism all make their appearance. Much of this sounds dull, but in Professor McClay's hands these topics become lively, vibrant, and tied to the great issues of our times. And he manages all this in only 35 small pages that have a lot of white space between the lines. In the second part, only 59 pages, McClay discusses sixteen enduring themes or issues in American history. He calls them "windows"; they are listed below. Any one of the windows opens into library rooms full of scholarship, and McClay's wrestling his knowledge into compact mini-essays, from two to five pages each, is simply remarkable. Careful readers will detect that McClay leans in a conservative direction, but by the end of each essay one concludes that he fairly covered the essential ground. In a book full of lively passages, there's only room to quote one: "... you should think of American history as a drama of incomparable sweep and importance, where all the great questions of human existence and human history -- the proper means and ends of liberty, individuality, order, democracy, material prosperity, and technology, among others -- have converged, been put into play and brought to a high pitch, and are being worked out and fought over and decided and undecided and revised, even as you read this. It is a drama of enormous consequence, with both praiseworthy and execrable aspects, whose outcome is far from certain. There is no need to jazz up American history, or dress it up in colorful period costumes, as if it were a subject that is not inherently riveting." This short and readable book will most interest history majors and those in history graduate programs, but it deserves an even wider readership among Americans who have come to an interest in our nation's past through biographies, novels, or the History Channel. -30- The sixteen windows are: America and Europe, Capitalism, The City, Equality, Founding, Frontier, Immigration, Liberty, Nation and Federation, Nature, Pluralism, Redeemer Nation, Religion, Revolution, Self-Making, and The South.

I came across this valuable little book by way of a recommendation, and have been most pleased. As a first-year graduate student (albeit in European history) I was searching for ways of thinking about "doing" history. McClay offers many insights delivered in thoughtful, reasoned, and balanced prose. Although his focus is American history, I believe students of any field of history might benefit from his ideas. His central conceit consists of metaphorical "windows," or themes, through which American history is to be viewed. These serve to guide students in thinking about the key issues that our country has faced since its founding. The book has its limits, of course. It is an introduction, so do not expect an in-depth discussion of historiography or methodology. As well, his audience appears to be the underclassmen of college or upper-level high school students, more than graduate students. While McClay is a political and ideological conservative (the book is published by ISI), he does not, to my thinking, let this bias him to a negative degree. He is seeking to teach students to think honestly and rationally about their nation's past and what that means for the present and the future. I have returned to this book on more than one occasion throughout my graduate studies and will no doubt do so again. If he publishes further volumes like this one, I will be first in line to buy.

I took two classes from Prof. McClay before I read A Student's Guide to U.S. History. I highly anticipated reading this volume since he was an excellent classroom teacher. My expections were met and then some. He is one of the best at classroom teaching and one of the best with the written word. I highly recommend this book!

Over the past several years, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) has published a series of guides to college studies, ranging from history and literature to the core curriculum and liberal learning more generally. In this slim volume, Professor McClay develops a framework through which we might begin to view the unique entity that is American history (and America itself). McClay laments, with some justification, the fact that students at the high school and college levels are usually taught U.S. history as a string of facts or periods; as a corrective, McClay selects a (non-exhaustive) set of themes, "windows" as he calls them, which undergird the discipline: equality, religion, liberty, nature, urbanism, the frontier, and federalism, to name but a few. It is a work neither of the philosophy of history nor of historiography; nor is it jargon-ridden or overly abstract. Rather, its simplistic treatment of the basic building blocks of American history easily serves as a solid starting point for more detailed studies of our past, not to mention the many fine books to which it refers the reader for further perusal. Indeed, this is its purpose as well as its strongest element.