Welcome to the American Story. Mostly true stories about what it is that makes America beautiful.

Heartbreaking, funny, inspiring, and endlessly interesting.

This is Chris Flannery with the Claremont Institute.

I call this one.

Dedication.

An old friend of mine has written a book, a very good and deeply learning book about America. It just came out.

My first thought is not about the book, but about friends. Life would not be worth

living without them. They seem to come to us with some kind of luck. But what luck? In my life's luck, I ended up with

friends who learned life-changing things together. Really they were life-giving,

life-bearing, life-revealing things.

We became old friends by spending our lives trying to learn more about these things and sharing

what we thought we learned with others. Many of us

became teachers, some of us wrote and are still writing books. One of the things these

friends learned about was America.

In one way or another, every one of them acquired an attachment to and a reverence for the country

that could only come from understanding.

But it wasn't reducible to understanding.

Understanding was a necessary but not a sufficient cause of the attachment and the reverence.

Each of us somehow came to belong to the country and the country came to belong to us.

We became Americans, not just by law or accident of birth, but in our souls. And becoming American was and is, a thrilling

ennobling cause for gratitude and a constant inspiration to be better men and

women, to be people who deserve to be free.

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