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- [00:10]
A
Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan.
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And I'm Juan Davalos. We're back with the Great American story, A Land of Hope. We're on to lecture number two today, Beginnings.
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And like a good historian who begins at the beginnings, Dr. Maclay starts with the European settlement of America, beginning with Christopher Columbus.
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C
Yeah.
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And it's interesting because I remember learning even in high school that Columbus was actually not the first person to settle in America. And, of course, that's something that Dr. Maclay will cover in the course. And he will look to America as a land of hope from very early on in history. And he goes through several different groups of people that always looked to the west as a place of hope in a place that they wanted to go after to seek a new life, to seek a new beginning. And that was what America symbolized, or at least the west, what was beyond the ocean, symbolized for civilizations for many, many years. And so that drew explorers from many different places to seek out this new life in America. And then that's how we get to eventually Christopher Columbus, who came seeking that.
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A
And if it can't be said with certainty that Columbus was the first European explorer to discover the New World, it can be said with certainty that the consistent development of civilization in the New World followed Christopher Columbus's discovery. And Dr. Maclay points out that even Columbus did not envision what would come of his discovery. He had ideas for how this would promote the expansion of Christianity and civilization, but he wouldn't have even been able to envision the scope to which the New World would flourish and blossom yet.
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C
Yeah.
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And I appreciate very much Dr. Maclay's treatment of Columbus in this lecture, because he's been very much maligned recently by historians, of course, because anybody that colonizes or comes to a new land is seen as in our modern times, as somebody who's coming to oppress or, you know, whatever the new narrative is. But what Columbus was doing is exploring. And that's something that you. You have to admire. Right. If you study history properly, you have to try to understand people from the time as they understood themselves and try to put yourself in their shoes. And if you look at it from that perspective, he was doing something extremely courageous.
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A
He was. And if you want to hear more about the courage of Americans, especially later Americans, as we anticipate the 250th anniversary of our country, I encourage you to watch the videos that Dr. Maclay and Dr. Arne and others have done at storyofamerica hillsdale.edu these videos chronicle important events in the American founding battles, statesmen, and other noteworthy historical occurrences, and other noteworthy historical occurrences. Go to storyofamerica hillsdale. Edu and you'll have see a collection of nice 10 to 15 minute historical videos that will help you better understand your nation.
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Now let's turn to lecture number two, Beginnings of the Great American Story, A Land of Hope.
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C
Hello and welcome to this series of lectures on United States history, subtitled A Land of Hope. It's based on a book that I've recently published called Land of An Invitation to the Great American Story. I'm Wilfred Maclay. I'm a professor of history, classics and letters at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma, and I'm also a teaching fellow at Hillsdale College. We mean Land of Hope to be a companion volume to this course, and I hope you'll get it and read it and look for further expansion of some of the points that I'll have to pass through very glancingly in this highly abbreviated study sweep of American history. This first lecture is called Beginnings, and appropriately, it deals not only with the beginnings of the history of the United States, but with the beginnings of the study of history itself. Why do we study history? Why do we engage in this vexing, often difficult task in which the reconstruction of the past is endlessly fascinating but endlessly elusive? Why especially, and I hear this all the time from my students, why do we study history today when we're living in an era that is so unprecedented in human history? The technologies that we enjoy, the level of medical care that we enjoy, longevity, the physical well being that are the fruits of modern advances in science and technology? Why should we be concerned with the events of classical antiquity or of the 17th century, or even at the time of the American Revolution, let alone the times before that? Why should we care about the past? Is the past just a dead letter? Well, I think there are a lot of ways of answering that objection, but one of the best that I've ever found is a quotation from an essay by the American writer John Dos Passos, a very interesting fellow who started out as a very radical figure and was a radical innovator in the art of the novel, and then became, later in life, a great admirer of America and of the American experiment. This is a quotation from one of his essays called the Use of the Past. Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times, history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger, we're driven to the written record by A pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today. We need to know what kind of firm ground other men belonging to generations before us have found to stand on. In spite of changing conditions of life. They were not very different from ourselves. Their thoughts were the grandfathers of our thoughts. They managed to meet situations as difficult as those we have to face. To meet them, sometimes lightheartedly and in some measure to make their hopes prevail, we need to know how they did it. And then there's this part of the quotation which I think is particularly powerful today. In times of change and danger, when there's a quicksand of fear under men's reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional now capital N Now that blocks good thinking. That is why in times like ours, when old institutions are caving in and being replaced by new institutions not necessarily in accord with most men's preconceived hopes, political thought has to look backwards as well as forwards. This was written in 1941, which was a scary time in the world. The world was at war. The United States was about to join the rest of the world in war. The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. But we live in a scary time, too. All times are scary to those who are willing to perceive the difficulties and dangers around them. So this speaks to us as much as it did to the generation of 1941. That this notion of history being a lifeline, giving us a sense of continuity with generations before us. And a source of wisdom about how to encounter and surmount life's difficulties. History is a kind of bank of knowledge that we ignore at our peril, that we draw on as we can. It's a kind of laboratory, too, in a sense, that we can't conduct experiments with human beings the way we can with inert materials and chemicals in a laboratory. But it gives us some evidence, in the way that experimental science does, of what can happen under particular circumstances. So it's a laboratory. It's the only laboratory we have for human affairs. We can't move beyond that. But history can never be a science. History is also, and this is something I emphasize in my book, history is also a story. It's a collection of stories. It's stories that, for us Americans that help us understand where we came from and what it means to be a citizen that is fully a member of this society. A participating member, beyond the civics class meaning of that to be participants in a full and conscious way in this astonishing and amazing country. We human beings are story makers. We remember the past and retain the past through stories. Stories are one of the ways we find meaning in life and sustain meaning in life. We need that. The word need is not an overstatement. It's part of our human endowment that we have to have this central organizing force for our lives. That's provided by the idea of the story in which we're embedded. This was a quote again from a beautiful quotation from Isaac Bashevis Singer, the great Jewish writer. When a day passes where it's no longer there, what remains of it? Nothing more than a story. If stories weren't told or books weren't written, and I might add, if history weren't written, man would live like the beasts, only for the day. The whole world, all human life, is one long story, and Singer is right about that. As individuals, as communities, as countries, we're nothing but tumbleweed, flotsam and jetsam without the stories in which our life's meaning is embedded. It's up to us to learn the meaning of those stories in which we're already present, which we're already participating in, which the meaning of our lives suspended like suspension in a web. History doesn't cover everything, unfortunately. We're more and more interested in aspects of the past that historians have ignored. The lives of common people, of everyday life in the past. We're not going to cover much of that in this course. And that is a source of some regret to me, because I think we get the sense that history is the total of the past, the totality of the past. And it really isn't that. It is those ways in which the extraordinary has erupted into the ordinary. It leaves out a lot of important things. It leaves out the vast stretches of time in which life goes on. Normally. People fall in love, have families bury their dead, and otherwise proceed with the small acts of heroism and sacrifice that make human life worthwhile. The unheroic acts, as George Eliot wrote in Middlemarch. The unheroic acts of those who live faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs. That's the large bulk of the human experience. We won't be talking about that very much in this course because we're concerned with the eruptions of the extraordinary. I'd add, history is not an inert account of facts that are marshaled into a particular order that remains sacrosanct. As Despasso said, Every age has to write its own history. It's an ongoing task of reflection, of disputation, of investigation and inquiry in what it means to be human. It calls to the depths of our humanity, and we ask fresh questions as circumstances change and we look at the past in a different way. The past doesn't speak for itself. We have to ask it questions. Finally, I'd like to say a word about the book's title and the subtitle of your course, land of Hope. The book argues from the very beginning that the Western hemisphere in which we Americans live was inhabited by people who came from elsewhere, unwilling, for the most part to settle for the conditions in which they were born and drawn by the possibility of a new life, of a new chance at life, the lure of freedom, the space to pursue their ambitions in the way that whatever old world they came from did not permit. Hope has both secular and theological dimensions to it. But it's this ubiquity of hope in all of its senses, ultimately a sense that things as they're given to us are not the final answer about them, that we can never settle for, that. This is, it seems to me, one of the aspects of American history that marks it. It's not a material thing, it's a spiritual thing, and it leaves us vulnerable in certain ways. By professing high ideals, by being a land of hope, by holding out those ideals as doable as in fact necessary, we set ourselves up to be very roundly criticized, even condemned, for our failures, which are many to equal those ideals, to meet those ideals, to live out our lives in a way that respects them. In addition, many of our greatest heroes turn out, on closer examination, to be flawed individuals. We'll talk about some of those as we go through the course. But none of that really changes the fundamental theme of a nation, a people that had taken their impetus from this prospect of hope, of change, of new beginning.
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Hey there. It's Scott Bertram, host of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. On this week's program, we talk with Dr. Kathleen O', Toole, Associate Vice President for K12 Education at Hillsdale College. She'll tell us about the importance of education, informing citizens and her recent essay, citizenship Starts in the classroom. And Dr. Marty Billman, Associate professor of chemistry here at Hillsdale, returns for another series on drama in scientific discovery. This time we begin our discussion about the discovery of fire. All that this week on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Find it at podcast hillsdale.edu or wherever you get your audio. You know the Robertson family from the hit TV show Duck Dynasty. Now Hillsdale College offers you the unique opportunity to learn alongside the Robertsons as they dive deep into Hillsdale's online course, the Genesis Story. Every Friday on the Unashamed podcast, the Robertsons will share their insights and perspectives. Learning from Hillsdale professor of English Justin Jackson. Take a trip down south to Louisiana for this one of a kind learning experience we call Unashamed Academy. Visit unashamedforhillsdale.com and enroll today. That's Unashamed. F O R hillsdale.com to experience the genesis story alongside the Robertsons.
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So where do we begin, this story? That's a hard thing to say. If you think of your own life, where do you begin? You didn't really call yourself into being out of the void. You had antecedents, you had parents, your parents had parents and they had parents. There's a long succession of people who didn't dictate the terms on which they came into the world. None of us do. So in a sense, to tell your story fully, you'd want to go way, way back. Back to the beginnings. History always begins in the middle of things, so we have to figure out where to start. The entire Western hemisphere, as I mentioned before, including north and South America, was from the start populated by immigrants. That's, I think, a good place to begin. The first settlers came across the Bering Straits from northeastern Asia and filtered down into settling the continent from the Yukon down to Tierra del Fuego. In South America, we have the evidence of peoples who have vanished since the Inca, the Maya, the Aztecs, grand civilizations that flourished and flamed out and died in various ways, leaving behind splendid remnants of their lives and livelihood. We see in the North American continent earthworks and mounds, burial mounds. They're somewhat mysterious, but that are the remnants of what we would call now native or indigenous peoples in ordinary American places over the Midwest and the south. We see remnants in the west of the cliff dwelling peoples, the Anasazi, or use the Navajo name, the Pueblo peoples who are no longer there but have left behind these structures. There's something haunting about this. These civilizations that were and have gone. It's haunting too to think of the earliest explorers before Columbus, the Leif Erikson who tried to start a colony on the Canadian what is today the Canadian island of Newfoundland. He and other Norsemen were trying their best to establish a settlement. And in a sense they could be called the beginning of American history, but not really. They're more like a false start or on American history. And yet it does seem to me that in a larger sense they do fit into the theme, the larger theme of Land of Hope. They point to the presence of America in the world's imagination, even before America was settled, as an idea, the presence of America as an idea, a land of hope, a land of refuge, a land of opportunity, a of that second chance at life for those willing to take it. But we shouldn't be so quick to think that these early vestiges of American history are things that have nothing to do with American history. I think that statement may need to be modified that because in fact, these lost civilizations of the first Americans and the episodic voyages of Erickson point to a theme in American history, an underlying theme that's absolutely crucial to understand. They point to the presence of America in the world's imagination as an idea, as a land of hope, a land of refuge, a land of opportunity, a land that signifies and offers a second chance at. At life for those who are willing to take it. That's a theme that runs through all of the rest of American history. It may seem a little bit fanciful to attribute that motive to the Asiatic. The first Asiatic immigrants to the Western Hemisphere. They didn't know, we don't know anything about what they were doing. They didn't leave any remnants to indicate one way or the other what they had in mind. We do know that the Norse explorers were motivated by an impulse to explore, to find new lands and settle them. So they were drawn by something more than just necessity. They were drawn by this prospect of a new world, of a new start. And this was true 1000 years after Christ and 500 years before Christ, Columbus. There was already a mystique about the West. It was in the literature of antiquity. The ancient Greeks spoke of the Isle of the Blessed. Homer located the Elysian Fields in the West. That was where the stream of the world's seas flowed. Centuries later, Thomas More's Utopia, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, these are all expressions of this same theme, the promise of the West. So it's been thought of for a long time as a land of plenty, a land of wealth, a land of hope, an anticipation of what a new world can be. So I think we have to begin the story of America. For us, it's not the only way to begin it, but I think we have to begin in the middle of Europe's history. That America is best understood as an offshoot of Europe. Even the America comes from Amerigo Vespucci, one of the first map makers to understand that this was a new Entity that explorers were discovering. But I like especially a statement by the writer Lewis Mumford, and I'm going to make use of it in the rest of our time. He wrote, the settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. That's a nice phrase. What did he mean by it? Well, what he meant was that Europe in the late Middle Ages, after a period of extraordinary unity around the year 1300, that in the late Middle Ages, Europe was coming apart, it was entering the modern age. It was being disrupted by the rise of global commerce, breakthrough inventions that made such commerce possible and that these and other events in the world of religion, in the formation of nation states, in the economics of burgeoning countries, would set off what was one of the great historical conflagrations in the history of Europe, economic, social, religious, technological and cultural. This movement begins, oddly enough, with the movement to the east, with the discovery during the Crusades of the riches of the lands of the East Mediterranean and then east to what was then thought of as the Orient. The highly desirable goods, rugs, gold, silks, brocade, perfumes, et cetera, imported from Asia, for which there were eagerly desirous consumers in the European West. Marco Polo's famous account of his travels on the Silk Road was widely read and it spurred the restless imagination not only of prospective consumers, but of prospective explorers. People like Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, who saw the benefits of this contact with Asian cultures and of finding easier and easier way to facilitate commerce between them and Europe. That was important. Overland trade was very risky, very dangerous, very slow, very expensive. It could take a year to go from Beijing to Venice by an overland train. Political and other obstacles stood in the way. As consumer demand grew, the demand for a waterborne route connecting the east and the west became more and more imperative. As I said before, this was facilitated by advances in ocean going, navigation, by navigational instruments, the astrolabe and the dry magnetic compass and so on, the quadrant that all made navigation of great distances at sea much more and much more easy to carry out. There were vessels designed like the carrack and the caravelle that were fast and maneuverable and facilitated again this commerce. It was changing the social and economic map of Europe because all this trade was creating a whole new elite class of merchants and also of those who worked for the merchants, bankers, lawyers, accountants, insurance men. And that sort of thing would set up a whole city based merchant elite culture that rivaled and soon surpassed the older elites whose wealth and power were based on the possession of land. The old aristocracies These were being swept aside and political change was coming in its wake. The rise of new structures of politics, particularly the emergence of national monarchies, unified and centralized kingdoms over which individual rulers would be able to govern with vast authority and power, superseding the power of the old and established regional aristocracies. In 1492, there were four such powers in the world. England, France, Portugal and Spain. But of the four, it was Portugal, little Portugal, that took the initiative. Portugal became the place to go, Lisbon, the place to go for Portuguese based crews that explored the west coast of Africa, opened up the first waterborne trade routes to India, Vasco da Gama, Bartolome Dias and others. It was the exploits of these people that drew Christopher Columbus, an Italian from the city state of Genoa, away from his home to settle in Lisbon. At the age of 26, he was already a very experienced and highly capable sailor who had been to ports in the Mediterranean, northern Europe. He had voyaged as far as the Arctic Ocean, south to the West African coast. So he was convinced, unlike everybody else, that rounding Africa and going east was not necessarily the fastest and best way to make that journey. He became convinced that going west would be more direct, more inexpensive and faster. And so he formulated a plan for an expedition that would prove it. He took this plan to monarchs all over Europe and was turned down again and again and finally persuaded the King and Queen of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella, to front the money for him. He took off in the Nina Pinta in Santa Maria, August 3, 1492, and carrying along a letter of introduction from Ferdinand and Isabella to the Emperor of China, just in case they made it Columbus. By the way, Columbus was not an innovator in thinking the world was round. This is a widely shared myth that I ought to do my part to dispel. It wasn't that, it was that he thought there was a water route that would take one there. So Columbus set off on a voyage of really unimaginable daring. This is one of the things about the study of the past that we have to really exercise our imaginations to imagine what it was like without the kinds of technologies and without any precedent for this kind of thing to take off as he did, not really knowing where he was going. The maps of the time were very crude, and after all, he was going where no European had gone before. On October 12, he spotted land and it was one of the islands of the Bahamas. But he refused to believe that it was a New world. He called the inhabitants of the Indies Indians because he believed that's where he was. He was in the what we now call the East Indies. And so these had to be Indians, even though they didn't resemble anything he'd ever read about in the past. Between 1492 and 1503 he did four of these voyages, round trip voyages between Spain and the Americas under the sponsorship of the Spanish Crown. He remained convinced to the end that to all the evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, that the lands he visited during those voyages were part of Asia. He was possessed by an iron resoluteness that his initial theory had to be true. His final voyage took him to what would later be the site of the Panama Canal, just a few miles away from a Pacific Ocean, a vast Pacific ocean of whose existence he remained ignorant. He never knew it was there. I find this in the incredibly poignant thought. And he returned home really in disgrace and regarded as a failure because his theory had never been confirmed. What a strange irony. He made one of the most important discoveries in human history, certainly in European history, and yet he never quite realized it. He was never able to understand the meaning of what he had discovered. He was preoccupied with finding a new way to reach the riches of the East. But he had in a more momentous way made the discovery of a land in the West, a mysterious land of mythic renewal. He could not see that what was before him was potentially that land. In 1951, almost 500 years later, the American poet Robert Frost wrote a poem about this, captured the irony of it. A poem is called an all we Call American and we'll conclude this lecture with a reading of a part of that a charming poem. Had but Columbus known enough, he might have boldly made the bluff that better than Da Gama's gold he had been given to behold the race's future. Trial place a fresh start for the human race. America is hard to see. Less partial witnesses than he in book on book have testified they could not see it from outside or inside either, for that matter. America is hard to see. Columbus had trouble seeing America for the new thing that it was and could be and eventually would become. He wasn't the first, he wouldn't be the last. It's part of the human condition, a recurrent feature of human history, that we often find something that was not what we were looking for. And what we accomplish is not what we set out to accomplish exactly to do. Hence to Columbus's journey, we're also the beginning of a great collision of cultures, a process that also entailed tragic and bitter consequences. We'll have more to say about all of that. The downside of this fresh start for the world, the price that was paid for it in our subsequent lectures.
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Thank you thank you for listening to this episode of the Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast. If you want to continue learning, please visit hillsdale.edu course. There you will find over 40 free online courses, including Ancient Christianity, the Genesis Story, Classic Children's Literature, and many more. The courses include additional readings, study guides, fully produced videos, and you can chat with your fellow students on a dedicated forum. Upon completing a course, you will also get a certificate. All our courses are free because we believe that what you'll learn will enrich your life and that a virtuous citizen is the best defense for liberty. So pursue the education necessary for freedom and Happiness at Hillsdale. Edu CourseToday. That's Hillsdale. Edu Course. Thanks for listening.