The Great American Story: The Experiment Begins
The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast
Hillsdale College
4.6 • 621 Ratings
🗓️ 15 April 2026
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast, Jeremiah and Juan discuss the questions that dominated the politics of the Early Republic before introducing Wilfred McClay.
Americans have overcome many challenges throughout our history, including the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression, two World Wars, and the Cold War. Studying the great stories from our past inspires us to preserve the blessings of liberty in our day. Now you can study these stories with Hillsdale College.
Hillsdale’s free online course, “The Great American Story: A Land of Hope,” explores the history of America as a land of hope founded on high principles. In presenting the great triumphs and achievements of our nation’s past, as well as the shortcomings and failures, it offers a broad and unbiased study of the kind essential to the cultivation of intelligent patriotism.
The brutal institution of slavery, which pre-dated the Founding of America, grew and became entrenched in the Southern states. Although it was antithetical to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, slavery survived the Constitutional Convention and became the great source of national dissolution.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. |
| 0:13.1 | I'm Jeremiah Riegan. |
| 0:14.5 | And I'm Juan Davalos. |
| 0:15.4 | We're back with The Great American Story, A Land of Hope. |
| 0:19.0 | We're going to be covering lectures five and six today. |
| 0:21.6 | The experiment begins. That's right. So in our last lecture, we learned that America had |
| 0:28.0 | won the Revolutionary War. It had established a new nation. And now it needed to go about |
| 0:33.4 | the business of governing itself. That's a part that we typically forget because we focus so much on the revolutionary war |
| 0:40.5 | and how great America, you know, the idea of America is and the beauty of the Declaration |
| 0:46.5 | of Independence and the Constitution. |
| 0:48.4 | Those are incredible documents, the beauty of the American political thought as expressed |
| 0:53.5 | in the Federalist papers, but then we forget |
| 0:56.2 | that we actually have to put that into practice, and that's very difficult, and that's what Americans |
| 1:01.6 | start to do in this time period, and that's complicated. It takes a lot of prudence. Yeah, the difficulty |
| 1:08.6 | wasn't a surprise to the founders. They knew that governing |
| 1:10.9 | themselves would be difficult. All governing is difficult. And when you diffuse power among the people |
| 1:15.4 | and require the people to think about the laws of nature and nature's God as the standard, |
| 1:20.1 | that that's a good theory. It does work in practice, as our history has shown. But it doesn't mean |
| 1:24.9 | it's easy. It means people need to figure out how to |
| 1:27.9 | interpret the laws of nature and nature's God. They need to think about contentious issues and |
| 1:32.9 | issues of justice and issues of prudence. What is right by nature and then what is going to be |
| 1:38.9 | most likely to affect our safety and happiness? And so these are the types of questions that |
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