Wilfred McClay's Land of Hope wastes no time making its purpose known. The first thing you notice about it is that it looks like a textbook. From its heft and glossy pages to its artistic cover and evocative subtitle (“An Invitation to the Great American Story”), this volume would look perfectly at home on a school desk, in a backpack, or jammed into a locker. Without even opening it, though, you can tell that Land of Hope is very different from that other book with which it is being been compared—Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.
Land of Hope is a fact-driven history, open to the now radical-seeming notion that America is good. By presenting American history in full, McClay opens the door for a serious, studied patriotism. From the outset, this book sets itself apart from ordinary textbooks. Rather than dutifully marching through the facts and figures that led to the Founding, McClay takes care to situate America in a broader historical context. In quick but effective bursts, he guides the reader from the Crusades to the Reformation, stopping in at each milestone in European social, religious, and political history. At the same time, we see the premodern pilgrimage across the Eurasian land bridge of those who will come to be known as Native Americans.
By the time the first settlers dock at Jamestown, McClay has swiftly dispensed with the usual accounts of pre-eighteenth-century America. Neither winsome idealists nor vicious colonizers, the European settlers of the New World are presented as they would have understood themselves: as the inheritors of centuries of Western civilization. McClay, in turn, shows these settlers to be the most recent batch of rugged individuals, who, over millennia, have come here in search of a better life.
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