This is an IHeart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people coming to you from the city where the west begins, Fort Worth, Texas.

Up next, another installment of The Story of Us, the Story of America series,

with Hillsdale College

Professor and author of Land of Hope, Bill McLeigh.

For most of its existence, America's aspirations and concerns had been confined to the

mass of land between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, in other words, continentally, in other words, internally.

But all of that is about to change.

Let's get into the story.

Take it away, Bill.

With all of that being said, it was a time marked by an absence of any real disputes

or involvements in any kind of foreign war or even deep

or not so deep controversies.

Some even came to believe that this was the natural state of affairs.

America was a massive country spanning a great continent

with two great and natural buffers between us and the rest of the world.

The Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

This view of ourselves goes back to our very founding, the idea of being a city on a hill, the idea of

steering clear of foreign entanglements. Both were a fundamental part of our cultural DNA, so

to speak. One need only look back to America's indispensable man, George Washington, and his farewell addressed.

So far as we've already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith.

But here let us stop. Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none or a very remote relation.

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