A Student's Guide to U.S. History (Isi Guides to the Major Disciplines)

Rating:
Summary: McClay is an excellent teacher
Review: I took two classes from Prof. McClay before I read A Student's Guide to U.S. History. I highly anticipated reading this volume since he was an excellent classroom teacher. My expections were met and then some. He is one of the best at classroom teaching and one of the best with the written word. I highly recommend this book!

Rating:
Summary: McClay is an excellent teacher
Review: I took two classes from Prof. McClay before I read A Student's Guide to U.S. History. I highly anticipated reading this volume since he was an excellent classroom teacher. My expections were met and then some. He is one of the best at classroom teaching and one of the best with the written word. I highly recommend this book!

Rating:
Summary: great starting point or thematic overview
Review: Over the past several years, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) has published a series of guides to college studies, ranging from history and literature to the core curriculum and liberal learning more generally. In this slim volume, Professor McClay develops a framework through which we might begin to view the unique entity that is American history (and America itself). McClay laments, with some justification, the fact that students at the high school and college levels are usually taught U.S. history as a string of facts or periods; as a corrective, McClay selects a (non-exhaustive) set of themes, "windows" as he calls them, which undergird the discipline: equality, religion, liberty, nature, urbanism, the frontier, and federalism, to name but a few. It is a work neither of the philosophy of history nor of historiography; nor is it jargon-ridden or overly abstract. Rather, its simplistic treatment of the basic building blocks of American history easily serves as a solid starting point for more detailed studies of our past, not to mention the many fine books to which it refers the reader for further perusal. Indeed, this is its purpose as well as its strongest element.