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Welcome to this online course on American history presented by Hillsdale College. My name is Larry Arne. I work at the college, as the president of the college and as a teacher, among other things, of American history. We love the fact that you're here. We've done a lot of these courses. Now. Millions of people watch them. We're going to keep doing them. I hope you'll keep watching them. This one is a great one. We're very excited about it. It's taught by Bill McClay, who's a national treasurer. He's a professor at the University of Oklahoma. He's a distinguished professor of Hillsdale College. He's written several books. He's had a long, great career. He was on the National Endowment for the Humanities Board for several years. He's a significant man. And more important than that, he's a good man, very good man. And an unusual kind of scholar. At the end of this remarks of mine, I'll explain what's unusual about him. My four points to make today are, why would we study history? How do you study history? Well, why American history? And then something about Bill Maclay. So first of all, why study history? Comes from a Greek word, means inquiry, looking into things. The first book of history was written by Herodotus. It's called the Histories. The name was available. It's a story of the past. And of course, not everything in the past, significant things in the past, things that we can learn from, things that stand for something. It's just a piece, really, of this wish that we have to understand. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle says in the first line, the human soul stretches itself out to know. We like to know. And one of the things we like to know is we'd like to know about ourselves. Because unlike other creatures, we're not ruled simply by instinct. We have to choose our way. Which way should we go? We do that by looking inside ourselves. And when we look inside ourselves, it's a different thing than other creatures appear to do when they look inside themselves. Because we can conceive other ways to do things than the way we do them. And then the second thing is we look at others. And we are unusually well equipped to do this because we can talk, we can explain things to each other. We can tell each other about our inmost thoughts. Journalism, which is a slightly disreputable field, but important. That's the story of today, written for the public so they can know what's going on. And we can all read that and see it in some ways better than if we just saw it with our own eyes. Sometimes worse, of course, too. So history just expands the scope. We live in United States of America, most of us, in the year 2019, when we're taping this, there's a lot going on in the country. We know about that. If we pay attention to affairs of the world, it's rich with meaning and example, things to learn. But even if you take the peak, things that have happened in our time, whatever they are, first of all, it's kind of hard to tell what they are because, you know, people have different opinions about different things. But everybody has to admit that really great things, important things, telling things, informing things, most of them happened in the past. And the past is the only thing we can study intensely. The present is fleeting, past is fixed, at least according to the old school of thought. So you go back in the past and you can look at the peaks and the valleys and the ways of people, and you can have a commonality with them. And you can learn a lot more, actually, than you can learn by watching. I was talking to an admiral, retired the other day. He was the commander of the Pacific Fleet of the United States. He's an important commander. He fought in four wars, Very brave man. And I was asking him about the wars, and he knows a lot about them. But, you know, I noticed most of what he knows about them is not what he saw. It's what others told him. You can't really see a big battle anymore. They're so huge, nobody sees them, sees them all. In a war, that's a long thing. How would you see all of the Second World War, which happened all over the world and went on for five years? Well, historians, they put together every piece of evidence there is, and they tell the story from that. And the evidence comes from what people saw and remembered and said and wrote. Written things are particularly valuable because they don't change much. You can read them later, where stories might get, you know, verbal stories might get altered. So you can see much more through history than you can see from reading the newspaper, because it goes back through time and because it can put together an account of it that no individual person would ever have been able to see. Thucydides wrote the second important book of history called the Peloponnesian War, and he was a commander in that war, lived through the war. But, you know, there were huge things that happened, and he was not there. And so he found out about those things from people who were. So that's why you study history now. How do you study it? Well, these days, it's a deconstructionist age. And what we think is we're our own special Time, a development or a progress on previous times. And that sets up a way to reinterpret those old times so that they fit our categories. And we tend to look down on them a bit too. And that seems to me exactly wrong. I read a proof of it the other day of the wrongness of that in a book that's not a book of history. Chesterton wrote a book called the Everlasting Man. If you haven't read it, I recommend it. And it starts out with some cave paintings from, you know, prehistoric times, primitive men. And he quotes a lot, a lot of what a lot of people have written about that time. Particular thing he dwells on is somebody painted a horse on the wall. He says, you know, they must have had primordial and primitive rituals of which this painting was a part of perhaps some sacrifice of the animals. And he says, you're missing the forest for the trees. Because first of all, what do you see? Somebody drew a horse on a cave so long ago that there's no other material record of it or, well, reasonable record, I'll define that word in a minute. And that meant that whoever drew that, that fella could draw. And if you draw a picture, a sketch of a horse, even a bad one, on a wall, that's exactly like writing the word horse on the wall. Because only to the human mind, that picture of the horse stands for horse. Not just that horse, but horse. Chesterton makes the point that one of the horses is sort of standing oblique, not straight on and not straight sideways, but sort of like this. And then he's got his head turned back this way. And that's harder to draw, but it shows something different about the horse than just a flat, straight on picture. Chesterton says that person is a brother. That person spoke to us. He said hello, because he's like us in that decisive respect which no other creature has. Now, if that's true, then, you know, I encourage you. If you haven't read Herodotus or Thucydides, I've mentioned them, go read them. They are interesting, and I think that they will strike you as insightful and wise and full of lessons not just about the ways of different peoples, but also the ways in which peoples are the same, including today. So you would study it to find out that. And that means that history would need to be like the things that happened. And that's an art. You got to work at that. As I say, these days, we get away from that art. The most popular book for high schools, History of the United States, is by Howard Zinn. And it's just a reinterpretation of American history, a long procession of its evils. In light of the late, fashionable moral view, there's not much effort to understand the thing as it understood itself. You know, it is true that we had slavery in our country. It is true that we had the highest body count in our history, getting rid of it in the Civil War. And there were certainly very many people who suffered their death who went to fight because they didn't like slavery. Quite a few of them came from Hillsdale College. And so in that respect, that issue is the same then as it is now. And one could learn from the people who grappled with it most fiercely. But we don't do that so much. Anyway, they were slave owners, and that's that. I worked for Martin Gilbert, sir. Martin Gilbert, the official biographer of Winston Churchill. I eventually succeeded him in the completion of that biography, which we here at Hillsdale College have recently done. He wrote books based on documents in chronological order, and he tried to write fairly what those documents said. That means many points of view. He wrote the largest biography in history of Winston Churchill. And, you know, Winston Churchill was, in my mind, a very great man, but he made mistakes. Sometimes one criticizes him. I'll read you a quote from Bill Maclay about that toward the end here, Gilbert. Why did he go about it? Because people don't go about it that way much anymore. Why did he go about it this way? He recorded this as a quote. He said, on the tomb of the 19th century Church historian Bishop Mandel Creighton, are inscribed the words, he tried to write true history. Like the bishop, who was a member of my own college at Oxford, Martin was a member of Magdalen College. I believe that there is such a thing as true history. What happened in the past is unalterable and definite. To uncover it, or as much of it as possible, the historian has several tools. Among them documentation, chronology, memoirs, and the vast aberration of scholarly work. Others have delved and labored in the same vineyard. I'll interrupt here and say that I'm reading Bill Maclay's History of the United States, from which this course is derived. I'm partway through it. It's delightful. And what's interesting about it is he's a man of great mastery and long study, and he makes that story simple and lovely, including its criticisms of the United States along the way. Here and there, he doesn't lose sight of its excellence and of its particular greatness. That's how Martin Gilbert wrote about Winston Churchill and, you know, that's the way he wrote about Winston Churchill. What he says there about history is unalterable and definite. You know, there's a funny thing. When we're picking what we're going to do from among various options, we always have two things in mind. One is what would be the right thing to do, and the other is what is possible to do. And, you know, you can't always do the purely right thing. Winston Churchill made a deal with Joe Stalin. He hated communism before, after, and during this deal, he did it to have a chance of beating Adolf Hitler, a more imminent danger. Our choices are all like that. We are circumscribed by. By circumstances. And yet, on the other hand, we can feel guilty after we make a choice. Did we go too far in the wrong direction? Did we participate in something we wouldn't otherwise do too lightly, thinking that we were compelled when we weren't? Did we forego some great opportunity because we were lazy or tired or something? Then we question ourselves, right? Well, if you go back and study the people in the past, they're in the same situation, and yet in their case, the whole story is known. It's not changing anymore. Some people think Donald Trump is a terrible president. Some people think he's a great president. It's too early to tell. You know, I mean, I personally have supported him, but we'll know after it's over and maybe not until long after it's over. Whereas if you could read history of the story of America or of Winston Churchill, related stories, those two, by the way, and you could read them with an eye to remembering that these people don't know any more about the future as it existed for them than we know about the future as it exists for us. And they're making choices amidst circumstances, and it's very difficult. And you can see how they make them. And if the. If it's a thing where the records are rich, as there are for most of American history and for all of Churchill's history, there's just a huge amount of stuff. You can really put the story together in detail, and it's not changing anymore. Aristotle writes, this alone is denied even to God, to make what has been not to have been. Well, it's fixed whether. As. Whether we did a good job or something this week, whether I made some good decision or bad decision in the college. We'll know all about that later. Mostly, most of the decisions I've made look pretty good so far, but we pay careful attention in case they need adjustment. So history, it gives us a fixity that is made up of things that at the time were constantly shifting and hard to estimate. And you can go back and you can put yourself in the shoes, you know, of Winston Churchill or of Abraham Lincoln. Those, by the way, are two things that are sublime to do, beautiful to do, important to do, and you can be with them. Where Lincoln faces the question, should I let the south go? Look at the body count. He was very well aware, he said several times, most people in America didn't really want to live closely to a bunch of black people. Probably true that most, but certainly very many didn't think it was right to own them. And there were very many who did not share that view, not being around them. What can I ever do about this? Finally, Lincoln grappled with that question. You can grapple with him. Churchill, should we fight to the death against Hitler? He's offering a deal. Certainly, he forecast and it was proved right. It broke the greatness of Britain. This has never been the same since that war. And he actually sent this thing and, you know, was he right to say it? He said, if the British Empire should last for a thousand years, men will still say this was their finest hour. Churchill was very reluctant to make judgments like that. He tried to stop war all his life. He didn't want to get into it much. He tried to make that war cheaper. He tried to prevent it first. Both world wars in which he was involved. If you study Churchill, a great war leader, by the way, if you study him carefully, and I will tell you, in high places in recent years, very high places in America, there are people who studied him and quoted him, but they didn't study him very well because he never took that lightly. And, you know, there's a certain place where we in America have fought a lot of wars in recent decades. And one of the people who helped make the decision to do that said, well, Churchill was involved in that place. And I said to the man, I said, you know, just enough to be dangerous. You know, he got out of there the minute he could, and he didn't ever try to keep it. So the point is, there's a lot to know. And what can you know? Can you know it's now right or wrong to do what we're going to do in some country where we've had wars? No, you can just know that a serious man had caution about that. And what were the factors that he evaluated to make up his mind? You could look at the same factors. They may be different Today. But all of that depends on treating history as if it is made by people who, although very different from us in many ways, are yet still people. The animals that can talk to each other, learn from each other, recognize good and evil, which are all, by the way, we have a course on Aristotle where we explain this. Those are all related. Our ability to see good and evil and our ability to talk boil down to the same thing. And so a creature like that which lives in a perishable body and has needs, how does it steer itself? By the ultimate truth, when in its needs it's just like any animal? Well, that's the human test. And the people in the past had to go through that test. Good history then will be an accurate, insofar as it's humanly possible to make it picture of what happened in the past with a sympathy for the people so that one can learn from them. They made mistakes. Yeah. And don't we? Do we live in a perfect world today? If we don't, then they were grappling with the same thing we are. Third thing is, why American history? Well, the answer is two. It is one of the most significant things that ever happened. The birth and growth and survival of the United States of America. It's too early to tell, but it may be something parallel to the Roman Empire, Churchill thought so. Or the British Empire, or the flourishing in Greece that went on during the classic period. We'll only be able to tell that for sure when it's over. And one hopes that it won't be over until the last trump soundeth, but maybe it will. But it's, we can say provisionally right now, while that history is going on, it brought something new. It intended that something new to be a perfection of older things that were permanent. And it did it because it got an incredible chance. Nothing like it. Bill McClay, I can tell you, does a fabulous job with this story. A bunch of people moved to the new world, to the United States, mostly from Britain, and they went for various reasons. Some of them went to make money. A lot of them went because wanting to practice their religion just the way they wanted to practice it and not have the king interfere. There are a lot of reasons, and they don't know what they're going to get. Nobody has seen this, really. Just a few travelers landing here and there. What's it going to be like to live there? Who's there? They don't know. And so they land. Now, what did they bring with them? Well, not just the stuff, the clothes and the books and the shovels and whatever they had on the Mayflower. They brought a whole civilization with them. They brought faith in the biblical God, most of them. They brought knowledge of the classics. They brought acquaintance with the forms of government. In other words, they brought the whole meaning of a civilization with them to a new place. And then they started over. Remarkable. They brought everything with them except the aristocracy. And so they had to work out, how are we going to live under these radical new conditions? And they found out freedom matters, equality matters, consent of the governed matters. Before the United States was founded, they had about 150 years to figure those things out. 150 years of difficulty and strife. That story itself is amazing. And then it gives rise to the American Revolution, one of the most amazing things. And lots of people in Europe recognized it for what it was. A fulfillment of things that humans have hoped for from time immemorial. Everybody's going to get a chance. Everybody's going to get to live a fully human life. And we're going to work out how that gets done. If you want to see some of the wonder of it, I'll mention one particular Western movie, the man who Shot Liberty Valance. That movie, it's a very great movie. It's a John Ford movie. And it's a story of a founding. They're out on the frontier, and there are two things in the town, at least two, that the town could not, of its own devices, produce. One was a gun, and one was a book, a law book. And the Bible, too, was in there. And they mentioned both, right? They couldn't print the Bible in that town and they couldn't make that gun. They brought those with them. And the story of the Western, like many of the Western stories, is a story of the relationship between the use of force and the law. Because law is better than force, but law depends on force. And that's a very delicate story of how those things work out. It's like a lot of the Burley Bass stories. It has a tragic ending for one person, a very fine man who uses more force than anybody else. But as civilization is established, he has to recede. That's John Wayne. And Jimmy Stewart represents the law. And he gets to be a senator and he gets the girl. And yet he couldn't have done it without John Wayne, who sacrificed himself, you see. Well, that's a story of a founding of a civilization. And it's exactly parallel to the founding of the United States of America. A mixture of ideas and circumstances gave a great opportunity. That's why Bill McClay calls his book the Land of Hope. I'm going to read you two passages from it so that you can know what kind of man he is. He says one of the worst sins of the present, not just ours, but any present, is its tendency to. You know, I may differ. I'm going to interrupt. I may differ from him about that because we have a kind of an ideological or theoretical reason why we think the present is better. Bill Maclay is right. All ages have thought that, tended to that thought anyway. But we think it's a doctrine of how to understand the world, that everything is a progress, and that means any going backwards is a regress. There aren't peaks in the past which we can look up. There are only higher and lower things that are all below us. So I think this may be worse than Bill says, but he's right. It's common all over the place. Tendency to condescend toward the past, which is much easier to do when one doesn't trouble to know the full context of that past or try to grasp the nature of its challenges. This small book, he says, Land of Hope, is an effort to counteract that condescension and remind us of how remarkable were the achievements of those who came before us. That's a lovely thing to know. The book is written by a master, simply so it can be used in schools. We're going to use it in our 20 charter schools now because it's glorious and they can learn a lot from it, he says of the book, he says. Second, he says, this book is offered as a contribution to the making of American citizens. As such, it is a patriotic endeavor as well as a scholarly one. And it never loses sight of what there is to celebrate and cherish in the American achievement. That doesn't mean it's an uncritical celebration. Two things, celebration and criticism, are not necessarily enemies. And then he writes this beautiful sentence with which I'll leave love is the foundation of the wisest criticism, and criticism is the essential partner of an honest and enduring love. But watch this course and read this book, and then keep reading after that. This is a fine opportunity. Thank you for taking it.
