By Wilfred M. McClay, ISI Books, September 2000

No nation in modern history has had a more powerful sense of its own distinctiveness than the United States. Yet few Americans understand the immensely varied sources of that sense and the fascinating debates that have always swirled around our attempts to define "American" with greater precision. All too many have come to regard the study of their national history as tedious, just as they fail to embrace the past as something in which they must be consciously grounded.

In this introduction to the study of U.S. 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.

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About the Author:

Wilfred M. McClay holds the SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in the Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He is the author of The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, which received the prestigious Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American Historians. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Academy of Education, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and was recognized as one of the nation's outstanding educators in the Templeton Foundation Honor Rolls.

About ISI:

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) is a non-profit, non-partisan, tax-exempt educational organization whose purpose is to convey to successive generations of college youth a better understanding of the values and institutions that sustain a free and virtuous society.

Founded in 1953, ISI works "to educate for liberty" — to identify the best and the brightest college students and to nurture in these future leaders the American ideal of ordered liberty. To accomplish this goal, ISI seeks to enhance the rising generation's knowledge of our nation's founding principles — limited government, individual liberty, personal responsibility, the rule of law, market economy, and moral norms.

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