Wight Martindale, Jr.

In December of 1989, Wight Martindale, Jr. left Lehman Brothers after seventeen years of selling corporate and mortgage-backed bonds to pension funds and money managers.

He had lived through the difficult Paul Volker years when bond prices went down every day, through to the recovery of the late 1980s, when Tom Wolfe, in his best-selling Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) could identify top corporate bond salesmen as “masters of the universe.”

Why did he leave all this?

Because he was, 52 years old and he had always wanted to be a college English teacher. It was now or never. So he got his Ph.D from New York University in 1996 and he has been teaching literature, economic history, and American history to college and high school students ever since. As an adjunct, he has taught at Lehigh, Villanova, Temple, Drexel and The Main Line Classical Academy, a private secondary school in Bryn Mawr.

In 2005, he wrote a book about Kenny Graham’s West 4th Street basketball tournament in Greenwich Village, Inside the Cage. This summer tournament still flourishes, now approaching its 50th year. In 2013, he wrote about his transition from Wall Street to academia, Don Quixote Goes to College, published privately.

The Home School Guide to American History is based on Paul Johnson’s magisterial, 1,100 page study, A History of the American People (1999). Paul Johnson was a unique genius, a tireless polymath with sound judgment and a great love for the people who made a difference in history. And he knew a rascal when he saw one. Johnson’s study is better than any history textbook now available and it contains thousands of endnotes, which you can check if you want to know why Johnson says what he does. Even the best-intentioned textbooks are often written by committees and their blandness easily turns off students. History should never be boring.

As an older person, Martindale also understands that this is not the time to be running things and taking charge. That is a young person’s game. But older people are very good at looking back because their lives are almost entirely made up of the past. They think about it all the time.

This study guide takes a survey approach, beginning with the earliest explorers and Native Americans and it covers the American Revolution, slavery, events leading up to the civil war, reconstruction, western expansion, and the changes taking place in Europe that drove so many to America for a better life.

Martindale encourages his students to think historically–not by rushing to relate a past event to today’s concern, but to understand why in the past people behaved the way they did–to see life from their perspective, to consider what choices they had. He intends for this study guide to be a project that is done together–parent and child, a caring teacher and a curious student. Is there a happier way to learn?