WSPWH editor Leon Kass will be the recipient of the 2012 Irving Kristol Award, an annual award given by the American Enterprise Institute to an individual “who has made extraordinary intellectual or practical contributions to improved government policy, social welfare, or political understanding.” Continue reading →

In the latest issue of the quarterly journal Democracy, former Clinton speechwriter Eric Liu writes about the need for Americans to re-embrace their country’s ideals and become thoughtful and engaged citizens. Continue reading →

Writing for the Library of Law and Liberty, George M. Curtis III reviews What So Proudly We Hail. Continue reading →

In the latest issue of the Claremont Review of Books, William Gonch, a program associate at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), has penned a review of What So Proudly We Hail. Continue reading →

WSPWH editor Leon Kass spoke with Joy Pullmann of School Reform News about the importance of George Washington’s birthday and the upcoming panel discussion to celebrate the occasion: “First Among Equals: George Washington and the American Presidency.” Check out the podcast at the Heartland Institute. Continue reading →

Darren Beattie, a third-year Ph.D. candidate in political science at Duke University, reviews What So Proudly We Hail in Duke’s Chronicle newspaper. Continue reading →

At a speech given last week at the annual National Humanities Conference, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities Jim Leach praised What So Proudly We Hail. Continue reading →

In the latest issue of The American Interest, Kenyon’s Fred Baumann provides a thought-provoking review of What So Proudly We Hail. Entitled “The Way We Were?” Baumann argues that “the overall effect [of reading the book] on me was to induce nostalgia. The America that comes through here isn’t all that much like the one I hear, or at least read about, around me today.” After discussing the state of modern political discourse, though, he ends on a hopeful note:

As this collection reminds us, a lot got lost in the transformation from then to now, above all nuance, charm, true self-deflation, real humor and the compassion that arises from situations and the heart rather than from textbooks and the brain. [...] Perhaps I am here only revealing my age and premature crankiness in saying that the current conversation about who we are seems to me more irritable, shriller, uglier, yet also shallower and finally dumber than it once was. [... Yet] this book reminds us that, even outside the immediate family, there are people out there, not just abstractions. In that, it seems old-fashioned. Still, the fact that authors like Rodriguez, O’Brien, Hillenbrand and McCarthy seem to speak to Americans today may indicate that What So Proudly We Hail can be more than a memorial to a bygone America. With any luck at all, it may turn out to be useful for becoming again what we still are capable of being.

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Be on the look out for Gilbert Meilaender’s review of What So Proudly We Hail in October’s edition of First Things. Recommending the anthology, Meilaender writes:

What So Proudly We Hail is, therefore, a welcome achievement–rich and multilayered in ways that a treatise on patriotism could not be. It continually invites reflection on the nature of “America the Beautiful” and the difficulties of founding and sustaining a political community that, at least sometimes, also aims to be, in John Winthrop’s words (which, it is important to note, are first of all Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount), “a city upon a hill.” One senses that this volume is for its editors not so much a scholarly project as a labor of love.

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Leon Kass talks about WSPWH and the power of stories on National Review Online‘s “ Between the Covers ” with John J. Miller. Listen here .

Leon Kass talks about American exceptionalism and WSPWH on Liberty Line with Institute for Liberty president Andrew Langer. Listen here .

Amy and Leon Kass spoke with radio host Janet Parshall about the meaning of Flag Day on June 14th. Listen at Moody Radio. Continue reading →

The Weekly Standard celebrates WSPWH. What’s great about this collection, the Standard writes,

is that you can open it to any page and immediately begin exploring timeless questions of American creed and culture. And there are no better guides to the material than the Professors Kass and Schaub.

Memorial Day is coming up. What better time to celebrate the exceptional cultural products of this exceptional nation? And Father’s Day is right around the corner. Get Pops a copy — the whole family will be singing “America the Beautiful” and quoting Lincoln in no time.

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“[T]he United States, as a nation founded on a self-evident truth — the equality of all men — cannot have a national holiday that only celebrates courage,” writes Diana Schuab in Defining Ideas, “American courage ought always to be set in the context of another virtue, justice.”

Expanding on her remarks at the AEI event, “Why Memorial Day?“, Professor Schaub discusses the history of the holiday — originally Decoration Day — and how Frederick Douglass, one of its most lucid champions, understood its meaning and importance. Continue reading →

The editors of WSPWH spoke with popular radio show host Jim Bohannon or Friday, June 3rd. Listen at www.jimbotalk.net.

In National Review, the editors of What So Proudly We Hail write about the challenges, new and old, to American citizenship and how stories can help form good citizens:

Developing robust and committed American citizens is a matter of both the heart and the head. Like all building of character, it requires educating our moral imaginations, sentiments, and habits of heart — matters displayed in but also nurtured by great works of imaginative literature. As has been known at least since Homer and Plato, it is the poets, not the philosophers and historians, who shape the loves and hates of souls and cities. Today as well, works of fiction speak most immediately, engagingly, and movingly to the hearts and minds of readers of all ages. For these reasons, in our new anthology What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song, we have adopted a literary approach to making citizens, an approach centering on stories.

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The editors of What So Proudly We Hail explain why we should celebrate Memorial Day at The Weekly Standard: Take Time to Remember. Continue reading →

Why the concern with civic education? What is the problem to which your book is addressed?

Civic identity and civic virtue in the United States today face unprecedented challenges, making it more urgent than ever to find better forms of civic education. We must educate minds and hearts not only to enable the young to live decent private lives but also to be attached to our country and to use their freedom to uphold and improve its institutions and values—especially in the face of the novel challenges we face: religious and ethnic pluralism grow at home, weakening the idea of “one nation, under God, indivisible”; globalized connections grow abroad, encouraging cosmopolitanism; acrimonious cultural and political divisions threaten national unity; multi-culturalist and anti-nationalist ideologies question the very idea of American identity; cultural and civic illiteracy is alarmingly high; moral relativism is on the rise, and the popular culture encourages the young to think mainly of their pleasures and rights rather than their obligations and duties.

What do you mean by “citizenship”? Are we not automatically, by birth, citizens of the United States?

In one sense, citizenship is a gift and privilege of our birth, as is the right to vote and to participate in public life. But voting and electioneering do not alone an active citizen make. The quality of our common life—our schools, neighborhoods, public safety and public services, cultural and charitable institutions, opportunities for recreation and worship, etc.—depend on a more robust idea of citizenship, and on people who care enough about the well-being of their communities to engage in the activities that will enable them to flourish.

This volume has a very unusual approach to civic education. There is nothing here about the institutions of our government or “how a bill becomes a law.” Does your project imply a criticism of civic education as it is currently conducted?

Yes and no. Of course we believe that Americans should understand the basics of American government, such things as the separation of powers, checks and balances, and an independent judiciary. Good citizenship does require knowledge. More fundamentally, however, citizenship depends on attitudes, character, and the habits of the heart—what Abraham Lincoln, in his Lyceum Address, called “the attachment of the People.” Contemporary approaches have largely neglected, and even depreciated, the shaping of the sentiments and the cultivation of public-spiritedness.

How can stories, speeches, and songs create this attachment?

There is a story from ancient Greece about the relationship between poetry and politics that might be illustrative. Lycurgus is known to us as the founder of Sparta. However, before he undertook his political reforms, he sent the lyric poet Thales to Sparta to prepare the spirits of the people. Lycurgus recognized that there were cultural preconditions for the political order he was instituting. The Spartan character was shaped as much by Thales as by Lycurgus. While the sensibilities and virtues characteristic of the Spartans are very different from those modern Americans would admire, we believe that this connection between the imaginative arts and political life still holds.

Read more after the jump. Continue reading →

Leon Kass answers 10 questions from The Daily Caller about his new anthology and whether our leaders truly understand the foundations of our national character.

In this excerpt, Mr. Kass discusses whether America is exceptional:

Q. Is American exceptionalism an important component of our national character? And how would you define it?

A. America has been, self-consciously and from the beginning, an exceptional nation, from its unique founding on a set of universal ideas, stated in the Declaration of Independence and given operative life in the polity established by the Constitution. We are the privileged heirs of a way of life that has offered the blessings of freedom and dignity to millions of people of all races, ethnicities, and religions, and that extols the possibility of individual achievement as far as individual talent and effort can take it. The United States has been and remains a shining example of stable self-government and a beacon of hope for oppressed peoples all over the world. To belong to such a nation is not only a special blessing but a special calling: to preserve freedom, dignity, and self-government at home and to encourage their spread abroad. American patriotism embodies a pride in this blessing and this calling — without, I would add, needing to lapse into shallow, chest-thumping jingoism.

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Syndicated columnist Mona Charen praises What So Proudly We Hail after attending the 2011 Bradley Symposium, “True Americanism,” with the editors and other panelists, including Charles Krauthammer, Senator Lamar Alexander, and Juan Williams. What So Proudly We Hail, Charen writes, “should become The Book of Virtues for patriots.” Continue reading →