Hillsdale College Professor Wins 2022 Bradley Prize
The prize will be awarded to Wilfred McClay, the Victor Davis Hanson Chair in Classical History and Western Civilization, in May 2022
HILLSDALE, Mich. — Hillsdale College announces that Wilfred McClay, the Victor Davis Hanson Chair in Classical History and Western Civilization, has received the 2022 Bradley Prize. This honor recognizes individuals whose outstanding achievements reflect the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation’s mission of restoring, strengthening, and protecting the principles and institutions of American exceptionalism.
McClay will receive the award at the 18th annual Bradley Prizes ceremony on Tuesday, May 17, at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.
“Bill is one of those rare scholars whose work can inspire a veteran who lived through World War II as much as it can a teenager who is just beginning to learn about it,” said Rick Graber, president and CEO of The Bradley Foundation. “His masterful prose on America’s founding, history, and principles transcends generational and political divides and promotes much-needed civil discourse about who we are as a country. We look forward to celebrating his achievements at the Prizes Ceremony.”
The Bradley Prizes Selection Committee chose this year’s winners from more than 100 distinguished nominations. Each award carries a stipend of $250,000.
“Done rightly, history should be the most humanizing of subjects,” McClay said. “It opens reality to us in all its stupendous variety, from the earthbound lives of ordinary peasants and servants to the rarefied universe of the mighty and wealthy, and the astonishing range of human experiences in between. It seeks to provide a balanced and honest record of humanity’s achievements and enormities alike, generous enough to acknowledge the mixture of motives that every one of us flawed humans bring to life’s tasks.”
Before coming to Hillsdale College in the fall of 2021, McClay was the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma and the director of the Center for the History of Liberty. His book, “The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America,” received the 1995 Merle Curti Award of the Organization of American Historians for the best book in American intellectual history. His most recent book, “Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story,” won the Intercollegiate Studies Institute 2020 Conservative Book of the Year Award.
View a headshot of McClay here.
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