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Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
As our nation draws closer to its 250th anniversary, we also draw closer to the possibility of a new era of American greatness – if we choose it and, to paraphrase Ben Franklin’s famous observation, if we can keep it.
A significant part of moving forward as a nation of patriots is knowing where we’ve been and how we got here. There was a time when every American schoolchild received a rigorous – by today’s standards – grounding in American history and civics. Now the internet teems with disheartening videos in which interviewers-on-the-street stump passersby with once-basic questions such as, “Who were the opposing sides in the Civil War?” and “Which country did we win our independence from?” Educating ourselves and our children and grandchildren about our great nation’s history and heroes, rights and freedoms, and laws and government is an essential element of fortifying us to make America great again.
Toward that end, in a joint presentation with the White House and the U.S. Department of Education, Hillsdale College has produced a series of short videos called The Story of America, presenting stories from America’s founding, free to watch online here. For those who don’t know, Hillsdale College is a private Christian liberal arts school in southern Michigan, founded in 1844 and renowned for its classical core curriculum. As Hillsdale President Larry Arnn notes in the introductory video, the purpose of the series is to commemorate – “remember together” – historic moments from our nation’s origins, and “we can’t remember them very well if we don’t know them very well.” So the purpose of the series is first to educate those who have been failed by our Left-dominated educational system, and then to celebrate our exceptional history as one people.
Each episode in The Story of America offers viewers vividly told recreations of the dramatic moments that gave birth to our republic. In the inaugural full video, Dr. Wilfred McClay, professor of history at Hillsdale and holder of the Victor Davis Hanson Chair in Classical History and Western Civilization, narrates the story of “The Shot Heard Round the World,” about the battles of Lexington and Concord which kicked off our war of independence against England. He reminds us that the American Revolution wasn’t led by rebels looking to overthrow everything, but by people defending the way of life they had built through 150 years of self-government.
In the next episode, decorated Army infantry officer and current Secretary of War Pete Hegseth proudly relates the story of the formation of the United States Army: “The gallant soldiers of Washington’s continental army answered the call of liberty and rushed into battle not only for their freedom, but for ours as well. Their story defines us all.” Hegseth goes on to say,
To this day, the courage of the Revolutionary soldier and Minuteman beats in the heart of every American soldier. These individuals strive every day to build a future that embodies the extraordinary spirit of our nation’s very first citizen soldier.
As George Washington put it, “When we assumed the soldier, we did not lay aside the citizen.”
Subsequent episodes feature, among others, historian Walter Borneman on the Battle of Bunker Hill; Lee Habeeb, host of Our American Stories, on John Adams; Fox News host and author Brian Kilmeade on George Washington’s Culper spy ring; Daily Wire host Michael Knowles on the story of the American soldier; Vice President JD Vance on the birthday of the U.S. Marines; and author and radio host Eric Metaxas on Washington’s crossing of the Delaware River. More videos continue to roll out.
All of the videos in the series are of very digestible length (anywhere from four to fifteen minutes) and professionally presented for a general audience of all ages, without being dryly academic. An easy homeschooling lesson is to sit down with your kids and watch, say, one video a day which hopefully will spark deeper interest.
As Christopher Flannery, a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute and host of The American Story podcast noted in a 2020 Hillsdale College speech titled “Mystic Chords of Memory: Learning From the American Story,”
The American story, still young, is already the greatest story ever written by human hands and minds. It is a story of freedom the likes of which the world has never seen. It is endlessly interesting and instructive and will continue unfolding in word and deed as long as there are Americans.
To clarify that: the American story will continue to unfold as long as there are patriotic Americans who believe in, are proud of, and are willing to fight on behalf of, this nation’s special destiny in world history as a beacon of liberty and justice for all.
As we approach our 250th birthday, we are at a fateful crossroad: facing off across a political divide wider than at any time since the War Between the States, with one side vowing to make America great again and the other side hell-bent on tearing it all down. Hillsdale’s The Story of America offers just the kind of ammunition to empower and inspire true patriots to victory.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior.
In 1976 a lot of fire hydrants were painted with Stars and Stripes. One NJ fleet of cement mixers near me did likewise. I proposed to my wife as we were heading out to a performance of the musical 1776 in Princeton.
When I was in 4th grade, our class was taken to see the musical 1776 in the theater..
We all knew dates, names, etc.
Fast forward to today, where I regularly get wrong answers to “What century was our Civil War fought in?”
(One idiot couldn’t remember when we declared independence even after I told him eight times.)
I’ll bet though, that the idiot could tell you all the characteristics of all the 72, or however many “genders” there are!!
Absolutely, we must return to emphasizing classical education and also teaching history, for as Marcus Tullius Cicero once wrote: “To know not what occurred in former times is to continue always as a child.” That does not mean we jettison the study of technology and science; it means we teach all subjects that mold people into dispassionate critical thinkers, but citizens driven by a passion to discover truth. Unfortunately, much of our educational system now produces propagandized adult “children,” not lifelong students who continue to learn from the corpus of history, etc., and ponder the teachings. Finally, part of the challenge rests with us. In addition to formal education–to insist on excellence–it is our personal responsibilities to be lifelong autodidacts, including self-study of the past. Then, as Livy wrote, we will learn from history “what to emulate, and what to mark for avoidance.”
When we lived in the San Francisco Bay Area we always hosted a 4th of July party. One day as I was out in the front yard hanging the bunting on the front of our house. A young man who was walking by asked why I always hung bunting every July. I told him I did it to honor my ancestor who died fighting the British in the Revolutionary War. His response was “you mean Germany.” It shocked me & I said we were never a colony of Germany, we fought Germany in WW1 & WW2. The young man still maintained it was Germany. I put down my decorations & went to speak with him. He was 17 & a high school senior. I was shocked, but I told him to Google it.
A couple weeks later he spoke to me in the yard again & said “ you were right we fought the British & we were once a Colony. We talked again & I gave him a run down of the events leading up to the Revolutionary War. He’d never heard of the Boston Tea Party or any of the other events in American history.
After that, the young man spoke to me often & wanted to know all I knew about the history of our country. He had many questions & I found myself reading up myself so I could share more with him. He wanted to learn, so much. I found out later from a friend who had a PhD in education that US public students are only taught history from WW2 until present.
Our young people want to learn about their country & we are doing a terrible disservice to our youth by not teaching them.
Thanks for sharing. That is a sad story, one unfortunately replicated in many areas of the country. Many young people indeed are ignorant of history. That is because they are not taught it thoroughly, and what they are taught seems skewed. For example, one might suspect that what they learn about post-WWII is couched in cultural-Marxist terms: group grievances, exploitation, all the “great” advances we made in the name of Social justice, redistribution of wealth that government is responsible for managing (it is not; it exists to defend natural rights), one is poor because another is wealthy, etc. Thus, sadly the real teachers of history today are Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, Dutschke, and Marcuse.
The title of the Front Page Magazine is entitled “The story of America.,” Along with the history of the United States. it should then be remembered and made clear that much of the greatness of the history of the United States of America is because this nation was, mostly founded and based upon the Judo- Christian percepts and the concepts and values of Bible based Christianity and not Islamic precepts and “values.”
As the second President of the United States, John Adams, had, so well, declared “The general principles upon which the Fathers achieved independence were the general principles of Christianity …. I will avow that I believed and now believe that those general principles of Christianity are eternal and immutable as the existence of God.”
Yes, the United States experiment in liberty has been greatly influenced by Judeo-Christian values. How do we know that? In part because of what the Founders tell us (e.g., as you point out, John Adams). The other major influences were the Anglo-Scottish and American Enlightenments, both built on Judeo-Christian ideas to at least some extent, but also from the whole corpus of Western human history, including the classical era of Greece and Rome. The idea of God-given Natural Law-Rights for example–the underpinning of the American experiment in liberty (and something by the way rejected by the Progressives)–extends back in time to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, as well as Cicero, the Church (e.g., Augustine, Aquinas, Luther), and Anglo-Scottish-American enlightenment thought. Which leads us to another contemplation: Is Progressivism (Wilson-Dewey-Croly, et. al.) a Western thought, or a de facto (at least) complete rejection of Western thought?
With the history of the United States, first came the Revolutionary War, then after America won that war, later in the year 1788, the US Constitution was officially ratified by Congress ,and from that year onward this is the law of the land for America.
So in this century during this “War of ideas” starting on 9/11 to now in this year , it should be known that those stealth jihadist Muslims who are living in the United States who attempt to have Sharia enacted in the US in place and instead of the US Constitution. They need to be reminded that the United States had something that is far better than Sharia. It’s the US Constitution. This is America, not Saudi Arabia or Iran.
As the former US President, Theodore Roosevelt, had well-spoken when he declared in a speech “There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country. There is only room here for only hundred percent Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else.”