Welcome to the American Story. This is Chris Flannery with the Claremont Institute.

This story is one in a series about an immigrant boy who became my good friend

and holds a special place in the history of the

Claremont Institute. He was born American but in the wrong place. I call this one

freedom of the mind. This would be his last class and he knew it.

90 minutes on a Sunday afternoon at Ashland University in Ohio. He made

it all the way through with his usual panache, but that was a heroic effort.

His cancer had become ferocious,

and he knew such an exertion would cost him hours of agony afterward.

I sat across the large seminar room from him with about 27 high school

teachers and at least one college president. The theme of the class was the

famous question asked by J. Hector, St. John de Kerve-Coure upon visiting America in the 1780s.

What then is the American, this new man.

This was a perfect question for Peter.

He had spent his life preparing for it.

And on this Sunday afternoon in July, he was doing exactly what he would want to be doing, exactly what he had with love and

eternal gratitude been doing his whole adult American life.

Reading great books and talking about them with students eager to learn the most important things.

The main texts we had chosen for the class were Benjamin Franklin's

Huckleberry Finn.

The class was discussing by way of introduction

the Declaration of Independence

...