Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan.

And I'm Juan Davalos. We're back with The Great American Story, A Land of Hope. Lecture 16 and 17 today, The Great War and its aftermath.

Yeah, another two-part are covering a really big topic. And I think Dr. McLeay does an excellent

job in explaining how the war came about, how America's involvement in the war came about,

and what its repercussions were. Yeah, it's an interesting change in an American foreign policy

that is a direct result of the progressive view of foreign policy,

which we covered a little bit two episodes ago. Right. We talked about the change. The founders

view on foreign policy was it was the purpose of the American government to protect the

lives, liberty, and property of American citizens. So when those things are actually being harmed or at

risk of being harmed, the government could use force, the military, to protect Americans. And the

progressives shifted that view away from the focus on the government protecting its own

citizens to the government making the world safe for democracy, so tyranny anywhere became a problem

for everyone, everywhere. And World War I is an example of that philosophy playing out on a global

scale. And it's a philosophy that since the early 1900s has dominated American foreign policy

since then until very recently. Wilson had sworn that he would keep America out of the war, but of course we entered the war in

1917 and the Americans and their allies won the war, and that gave us our first real experiment

in global government. It wasn't absolute. It was a beginning and attempt, but with the League of Nations

we saw the idea of a formal international government body that would govern the affairs of nations

across the globe, at least in some respects. And if you're enjoying listening to the course,

I encourage you to go to Hillsdale.edu forward slash course and watch it. The courses are beautiful.

There's a lot of learning resources that you can utilize to increase your learning and you can

take some short quizzes that will help you track your learning progress. You can go to enrolling

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