The Gems of American History: The Lecturer’s Art

The American story is one of great physical, intellectual, and spiritual adventure. Gems of American History explores how this extraordinary republic came to be--and what is required to preserve its legacy of liberty.

In this collection of twelve essays, the renowned historian Walter McDougall examines some of the most pivotal events and figures of the American saga to date. He revisits the ＂Machiavellian moment＂ that ignited the awakening of republican thought across the Atlantic. He reflects on the forg-ing of America’s civic identity from its earliest seeds in the colonial era. His profiles of William Penn, Benjamin Franklin, and the philanthropist and tycoon Stephen Girard reveal the profound role Philadelphia played in shaping the nation. He recounts the story of the Wright brothers’ romance with flight and how it captures America’s indefatigable spirit.

McDougall also warns that, for more than a century, leaders following in the footsteps of Woodrow Wilson have steered the United States down a path of foreign policy ruin that undermines our national interests and threatens our national character.

Leavened with a lifelong scholar’s wisdom and insight, Gems of American History assem-bles the wide-ranging sources of American principles and traditions, many of which have been lost to ideological amnesia, in a way that helps explain who we are and where we are going.

Walter A. McDougall is the Alloy-Ansin Professor of International Relations and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has become legendary among students. His many honors include the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for history. McDougall graduated from New Trier (Illinois) High School (1964) and Amherst College (1968). After military service in Vietnam McDougall received his PhD from the University of Chicago (1974). He taught at the University of California, Berkeley, before coming to Penn in 1988. He is also a Senior Fellow at Philadelphia’s Foreign Policy Research Institute where he edited Orbis: A journal of World Affairs. An unabashed generalist, his books range from France’s Rhineland Diplomacy 1914-1924 (1978) to the Pulitzer Prize-winning ...the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (1985), Let the Sea Make a Noise: A History of the North Pacific (1992), Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776 (1997), Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History 1585-1828 (2004), and Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829-1877 (2008), which was selected by the Athenaeum of Philadelphia as best book of the year. His latest book is The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How American Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest (2016) published by Yale University Press. A devotee of books, sports, and all kinds of music from Bach to Bob Dylan, McDougall lives with his wife in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania and has two grown children.