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.

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

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

I had to think about this quite a bit with, for example, the Nat Turner rebellion, which was just really awful.

But I toned it down somewhat for various reasons.

I wanted to emphasize it enough that students would understand that it was...

this kind of event and the stories that were told about it that led to the clamping down on slavery that occurs in Virginia and elsewhere in the wake of that one particular slave rebellion.

But this one was particularly bloody.

And so I had to include some description of what happened.

But I did it for the reason of making clear why there would be this reaction.

and not just for the sake of depicting violence.

Yeah, I don't think we disagree about that at all.

I took my kids, when I lived in Chattanooga, there's a bridge that's been converted into a pedestrian bridge across the Tennessee River, and there's a spot where lynchings occurred, a significant number, I don't remember now, but I think 18, 20, something like that,

And I made a point of taking my kids there and saying, look, there's all these happy people crossing the bridge, eating their snow cones and all this, but this was a place where these horrendous deeds took place.

But in introducing that in the wrong way,

You could give them an impression that that's all that America is about, that underneath it all, it's really just a country based on violence and the survival of the stronger over the weaker and so on and so forth.

And I certainly didn't want to do that.

I don't think you would want to do that either.

Well, you know, there's a point that, and the late Gordon Wood was here a couple months ago, and something like this kind of colloquy was going on, and he asked, I was interviewing him, that's the way we set up his visit, and I was tempted, but it wasn't my role to do so, but to ask the question, and he said the words in my mind, and the words were, compared to what?

Compared to what?

Yeah, yeah.

Compared to what?

And, of course, the interlocutor didn't really have an answer to that.

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