Bøger af Wilfred M. McClay

The Student Workbook is intended to be used with the Teacher's Guide. Both provide chapter summaries which teachers may use in teaching students to read for the main idea. The Student Workbook contains reading questions for each chapter of the LAND OF HOPE text; the Teacher's Guide has the same questions with answers. Primary documents accompany each chapter, broken into shorter segments to help with reading comprehension. These documents also have reading questions; the Teacher's Guide provides the answers. Documents are often the text of speeches, but may include diary entries and song lyrics. There are about two dozen map exercises; the Teacher's Guide has the keys. There are synthetical essay questions for each chapter and for final exams. Learning strategies and study "tricks" are also given. The purpose of the Student Workbook is to assist students in working through the LAND OF HOPE text with a close reading, and also to add some depth through the supplementary documents. The map exercises are "hands-on" and should help students master the crucially important geographic knowledge that the subject requires.

In this provocative book, Wilfred McClay considers the long-standing tension between individualism and social cohesion in conceptions of American culture. Exploring ideas of unity and diversity as they have evolved since the Civil War, he illuminates the historical background to our ongoing search for social connectedness and sources of authority in a society increasingly dominated by the premises of individualism. McClay borrows D. H. Lawrence's term 'masterless men'--extending its meaning to women as well--and argues that it is expressive of both the promise and the peril inherent in the modern American social order. Drawing upon a wide range of disciplines--including literature, sociology, political science, philosophy, psychology, and feminist theory--McClay identifies a competition between visions of dispersion on the one hand and coalescence on the other as modes of social organization. In addition, he employs intellectual biography to illuminate the intersection of these ideas with the personal experiences of the thinkers articulating them and shows how these shifting visions are manifestations of a more general ambivalence about the process of national integration and centralization that has characterized modern American economic, political, and cultural life.

No nation in modern history has had a more powerful sense of its own distinctiveness than the United States. In this introduction to the study of American history, Wilfred M. McClay invites us to experience the perennial freshness and vitality of this great subject as he explores some of the enduring commitments and persistent tensions that have made America what it is.