America & the New World

The American/New World years bring students, as American citizens, to understand the origins and history of their own country and to love and be grateful for what is noble in it. As the first and only nation founded on an idea - the equality of all persons - rather than ethnicity, America is unique and has drawn and welcomed successive waves of immigrants in search of liberty to her shores. The American year is the story of how those immigrants built the mightiest nation of modern times and ordered liberty that enabled them to do so. Reading biographies, poetry, folk tales, and learning ballads of the time, students will "enter in" to the history they study and note as well as the inheritance America has from the Gospels, Greek and Roman statecraft, and the culture of Christendom.
Ben Franklin's reported answer to the question what the Constitutional Convention had prodced, "A republic, if you can keep it" is a useful key for understanding subsequent United States history. Periodically, competing visions of "equality" arise to challenge the Founders' vision. The Founders understood equality to mean the equal dignity of each human person ordered toward the natural law, but sometimes the vision of equality is exchanged for the ideal of wealth and social condition, or equality of the individual unhinged from the natural law and human flourishing. Almost every serious political or cultural struggle in American history can be seen as the working out of competing visions of freedom as we strive to secure what Abraham Lincoln called the Great Proposition that all human beings are created equal.