Wilfred (Bill) McClay

speaker

209 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 2 Jul

Wilfred (Bill) McClay’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Radio Atlantic · American History as Rorschach Test · 2 Jul 2026 podcast

And you can write an effective op-ed.

It should be 500 to 700 words long.

If you wrote everything you knew about the subject and laid out all the arguments for the position you were taking about, let's say, birthright citizenship and why the Supreme Court was right in what it decided.

it would be 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 words long.

You have to rule things out.

And one of the things I noticed in looking at the newest textbooks is that there's been a tendency to inclusiveness run mad so that people often in response to political considerations, I assume, they include much, much detail that while not untrue,

hinders the process of reading.

Above all else, we have a generation, high school, fifth grade, whatever, college, that doesn't read.

And those are the people I was thinking of.

And so I try again and again to uncomplicate as much as possible things that I could delve into in great complexity.

Well, look, I could have whole sections of the book that are like sort of page six of early America, you know, and they might be very interesting.

But that's the author's job is to guess what his readers are most interested in.

That's my job to make that judgment.

Mm-hmm.

Whether I've been successful or not, that's for you to judge and anybody else who reads the book.

But believe me, and anyone who's written, David Kennedy, who's written a very widely used textbook, and I talked about this once, the hardest thing is knowing what to throw out.

And sometimes that will depend on... For example, I had someone ask me...

why don't you have anything about the Tulsa race massacre?

And, well, I'm married to a Tulsan, and I've been knowing about the Tulsa race riot, as they called it for a long time, and now it's the race massacre, but for a long time.

But it fits into the context of urban riots all over the country at the time, so I didn't...

Showing 81–100 of 209 · page 5 of 11