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.
