Wilfred M. McClay

Wilfred McClay is a professor of history at Hillsdale College. He previously taught at Georgetown, Tulane, Johns Hopkins, the University of Dallas, and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He is also a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Professor McClay is the author of eight books including Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story, a widely used textbook and narrative history of the United States.

He graduated from St. John's College and received a Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University.

Articles by this Author

Memory and America’s Birthday, Winter 2026 | Vol. 71, No. 1

While we “know” more and more about the American past, too many of our citizens are ignorant of who we are and where we came from.

A Tent on the Porch, July/August 1993 | Vol. 44, No. 4

First heard just a century ago at the Chicago fair, Frederick Jackson Turner’s epochal essay on the Western frontier expressed a conflict in the American psyche that still tears at us.

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