A Teacher's Guide to Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story

A wonderfully written, sweeping narrative history of the United States that will help Americans discover the land they call home.

Guide for Teachers using Land of Hope in the classroom

This Guide accompanies the original Land of Hope for High School and College age students

This Teacher's Guide to Wilfred McClay's Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story will be an invaluable supplemental resource for teachers who use Land of Hope as a textbook for courses in U.S. history. Prepared by Dr. McClay in collaboration with Dr. John McBride, a master teacher with more than thirty years of secondary and collegiate teaching experience, it is an exceptionally rich and useful tool for classroom instructors. Each chapter of Land of Hope receives a five-part treatment: a short summation of the chapter's contents, questions and answers about the chapter, short objective tests suitable for quizzes and exams, a primary-source document for class analysis, and questions and answers to accompany the document. In addition, there are special units to assist teachers in helping students to understand the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the origins of the two-party system.

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 political science and history as an adjunct for the past twenty-five years at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. For the past six years, Dr. McBride 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.