American Heritage: A Reader

Too many colleges and universities have become places for focusing on means and not upon ends and, as such, places where the confused and bewildered of the next generation acquire techniques and tools, but graduate having gained neither direction nor order to their souls.

The Hillsdale College History Faculty has painstakingly assembled American Heritage: A Reader in order to provide its own students with a true liberal arts education grounded in the American tradition. Perfect for classroom use at the high school level and up, this extraordinary textbook will provide readers both inside and outside the classroom with a traditional educational experience that enlarges and ennobles the mind.

From the Preface:

The primary role of this Reader is to supply a rich sample of documents from the periods we examine. These primary sources provide portals into the American past. Reading them, we escape the provincialism of our own time and culture. As artifacts of the past, they do not convey information merely, but they are the sources that historians interpret to make sense of our past. Consequently, we invite students to engage in the same enterprise as they examine these fragments of the American past as the primary means of understanding both the roots of American order and sources for contemporary disorders. This daunting task of viewing sympathetically ideas that, although part of our heritage, seem distant and alien is an important and exhilarating part of a proper education in which one seeks to make sense of oneself as an American.