A Teacher's Guide to Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story

Wilfred M. McClay is the G. T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma and the Director of the Center for the History of Liberty.

His book The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America was awarded the 1995 Merle Curti Award of the Organization of American Historians for the best book in American intellectual history. Among his other books are A Student's Guide to U.S. History, Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Policy in America, Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Human Person in the American Past, and Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity, and Civic Life in Modern America.

He was appointed in 2002 to membership on the National Council on the Humanities, the advisory board for the National Endowment for the Humanities, and served in that capacity for eleven years. He is a member of the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission, which is planning events for the nation's 250th anniversary in 2026.

He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Academy of Education. He is a graduate of St. John's College (Annapolis) and received his PhD in History from the Johns Hopkins University.

John McBride was educated at Rice University (BA 1968, MA 1971) and the University of Virginia (PhD 1977). He taught high school (mostly US History AP) in Chattanooga TN from 1974 to 2010, at the Baylor School and David Brainerd Christian School. He has also taught as an adjunct for the past 25 years at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, in political science and in history.

For the past six years he has taught (as a volunteer and most recently as an adjunct for Georgia State University) at Walker State Prison, which is Georgia's character-and-faith-based prison. He enjoys employing a wide variety of teaching methods, including games, trivium-style debates, and group projects.