By Alexandra DeSanctis
Thursday, January 22, 2026
In all my years as a student, I never quite managed to
grasp the purpose of history class. Try as I might, I can’t recall a single
classroom experience that awoke in me a passion for learning history as
story.
What I do remember of studying history is that subjects
were often presented as mere facts — dates, names, places — and accompanying
interpretations. Teachers presented a trove of data meant to be absorbed,
regurgitated for tests and papers, and forgotten thereafter.
I’ll say it before you can think it: My aptitude as a
learner (or lack thereof) surely contributed to the problem.
But I had plenty of school experiences that permanently
transformed the way I think. I can recall an eighth-grade English teacher who
taught me that reading widely and keeping a reading journal would pay
dividends. I remember what it felt like to study Hamlet with a teacher
who conveyed the timelessness of Shakespeare to a classroom full of distracted
teenage girls. I know what it felt like to take theology and moral philosophy
classes that, to this day, help me shape, articulate, and defend my beliefs.
Oddly enough, from an early age, my favorite thing to
read was historical fiction. I devoured books like Johnny Tremain and My
Brother Sam Is Dead, as well as fictional diaries of Marie Antoinette and
Queen Victoria. It wasn’t that I needed history to be lighthearted or
fictionalized to hold my attention. I found firsthand accounts of grim events —
The Diary of Anne Frank and The Hiding Place, for instance — just
as compelling. I wasn’t seeking entertainment in the classroom. What I wanted
was meaning and story.
It wasn’t until last year, when I encountered Wilfred M.
McClay’s narrative-history textbook Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great
American Story, that I realized that a well-taught history class could
offer both. McClay presents the study of history as an essential piece of being
an American citizen, a story — replete with facts, yes — that we must
understand in order to understand ourselves. He puts it memorably in the book’s
first chapter:
The story that this book seeks to
tell, the story of the United States, is . . . a story about who we are and
about the stream of time we share; it is an attempt to give us a clearer
understanding of the “middle of things” in which we already find ourselves. And
it is crafted with a particular purpose in mind: to help us learn, above all
else, the things we must know to become informed, self-aware, and dedicated
citizens of the United States of America, capable of understanding and
appreciating the nation in the midst of which we find ourselves, of carrying
out our duties as citizens, including protecting and defending what is best in
its institutions and ideals. The goal, in short, is to help us be full members
of the society of which we are already a part.
If the average history classroom experience is anything
like mine — and I fear most American students experience something far worse —
this vision for studying history is the antidote.
“We need stories to speak to the fullness of our humanity
and help us orient ourselves in the world,” McClay writes in the introduction,
explaining his narrative history model. “We are, at our core, remembering and
story-making creatures, and stories are one of the chief ways we find meaning
in the flow of events. What we call ‘history’ and ‘literature’ are merely the
refinement and intensification of that basic human impulse, that need.”
Fittingly, the epigraph to Land of Hope is from a
storyteller, the 20th-century novelist John Dos Passos. It says in part:
In times of change and danger
when there is 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 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 passage resonated with me because my experience of
learning what it is to be an American has been imbued from my earliest days
with a pervading sense of disorder. I can trace my first realization that I
lived in a nation to the exact day: September 11, 2001. My childhood
understanding of my country developed under the sprawling shadow of the Iraq
War. My early adulthood has been marked by the particular features of the
Donald Trump decade — a period of upheaval and fragmentation in politics and
culture that is still difficult to fully accept and comprehend.
The Dos Passos quote taught me something I never learned
in history class: the disorienting process of making meaning out of current
events is an enduring part of the human condition. By contrast, McClay argues
that history can be an anchor, a still point, something to ground us in
enduring truths even as the world shifts around us. He describes the historical
material chosen for inclusion in Land of Hope as “a river shallow enough
for the lamb to go wading but deep enough for the elephant to swim.” So, wade
and swim I did.
Over the course of several months, I read Land of Hope
as though I were taking a course — on my own, with pen and notebook beside me,
faithfully reading at least several pages a day. McClay was a genial companion,
pulling me along through American eras and events, familiar and unfamiliar
alike, with rich, enjoyable prose and insightful interpretations. As I studied,
I felt that I was fulfilling a sort of civic responsibility to the past and the
present — and perhaps the future, as my study has given me much to offer my son
when he begins his own lifelong project of understanding America and his place
in its story.
As a busy adult, I found myself engaging deeply with the
material and absorbing it in a way I never did during my school years, when my
sole job was to read and absorb. The writer and professor Alan Jacobs recently
shared this email from one of his students, which attests to this very problem:
“While I always want my final papers for classes to be the culmination of all
my learning, in truth, they usually end up being the worst work of the
semester. I always find out what I really wanted to say once the break starts
as I learn what it feels like to be a thinker and not just a harried, hunted
animal.”
I was far more thinker than hunted animal when I settled
in with Land of Hope each day. When encountering passages that I didn’t
fully understand, I reread them; I remembered what I’d read. Two memorable,
big-picture lessons I gleaned from my study: First, we should study history
with an eye toward asking as many questions as possible, including those we can
never answer in full. Second, we should take care not to view events of the
past “as if they were predictable stages leading to a preordained outcome” — as
though, because we know what happened, the events themselves must have played
out with a sense of inevitability.
I regularly began to find myself bringing these insights,
along with fairly well-retained knowledge, to other aspects of daily life,
which allowed me to make more connections and think more deeply. When I watched
Darkest Hour — the 2017 film about Winston Churchill — I found myself
appreciating it more than I once would have, thanks to the newfound knowledge
and context I had about World War II. The chapters pertaining to the Civil War,
meanwhile, have allowed me to visit the historic battlegrounds in my hometown
of Fredericksburg, Va., with fresh eyes, understanding far more about them and
their sacredness than I once did.
We need this historical context to navigate modernity,
especially as misuses and abuses of history abound. For an increasing number of
Americans, history is now either a project of memorizing facts with no care for
their meaning or a vaguely disguised effort to promote ideology. Recent years
have featured a particular emphasis on treating history as something to
relitigate and purge — tearing down statues, renaming roads and forts and
schools, as if we could absolve ourselves of past sins by closing our eyes.
In addition to ignorance of history, we contend with
those who prefer to distort it in service of political ends. The worst culprits
are proponents of identity politics, who seem to believe that history is
worthwhile only if we study marginalized groups and wield our learning to
accomplish progressive action items.
Here in Fredericksburg, the local history museum recently
commemorated the anniversary of the Marquis de Lafayette’s 1824 visit to the
town with an exhibit about “diverse” Revolutionary War figures, including
Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, whose credential for inclusion was that he may
have been secretly gay. Similarly, when I visited Colonial Williamsburg a
couple of years ago, the tour of the historic Governor’s Palace began with the
guide taking an informal poll of the tour group: “Would you like me to give the
Governor’s Palace tour or the ‘black history’ tour? Majority rules.” In an
ideal world, these tours would be one and the same, not billed as separate
stories — surely, “black history” can and should be woven into the broader
story of the palace and its role in the town rather than separated to make a
political point.
Viewing history as a means to modern political aims is a
type of blindness, which prevents us from gaining valuable insight about the
complexities of the human experience. Among all else it offers, Land of Hope
gives an implicit rebuttal to this impoverished view. The book presents
history as an essential means of understanding the American project and how we
ought to live as we carry it forward.
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