August 8, 2011 • 25 mins
In the second portion of their interview with author David McCullough, Sarah and Deblina, focus specifically on their favorite parts of his new book "The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris." Tune in to learn more about McCullough's research process.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm far A Dowdy and I'm to bling a charcoal
boarding And this time we're going to pick up with
an interview we conducted earlier this summer with author David McCullough.
(00:21):
We got to talk to him about his new book,
The Greater Journey Americans in Paris, And during the first
half of this interview we really kind of just talked
about the book and how it was almost an unusual
style of book. It covers so many people, so many
different Americans who travel to Paris during this long nearly
hundred years span of time and accomplish a lot um.
(00:44):
And we also got to talk to him then a
little bit about his research specifically for this book, of
a lot of it surprisingly took place here state side. Yeah,
we talked to him about some things like his inspiration,
how he picked his protagonists, um, a lot of questions
that focused on the book specifically. But we stopped the
first part of the interview there knowing that we had
(01:07):
more to give you guys, but we wanted to give
people a chance to pick up the book and be
able to read it first, and we didn't want to
give too much away, and we wanted Mr McCullough's words
here to be able to kind of add a little
bit of context to to what you got from the
book and what you already knew. And also selfishly, we
wanted to be able to take the chance to talk
to him a little bit more about his own process,
(01:29):
what really inspires him and how he does his research
and puts a book together. Not too selfishly though, because
I think it's really going to help all of you
guys out there who are historians, are amateur historians, are
just interested in conducting your own research. He gave us
some really really great tips. If we're gonna tease you
guys a little bit here at the beginning of this interview, Yeah,
(01:51):
So basically, even if you haven't read the book, I
think you'll really enjoy this part of the interview. But
that comes later, and first we're going to get back
to a greater journey. So the part of the book
that I was most eager to talk about and to
hear the author talk about was a chapter called the Medicals.
In it, as the title suggests, Mr McCullough focuses on
the this little world within a world of the greater book,
(02:15):
and it features hospitals, famous doctors, patients of course, with
all sorts of ailments. But his main focus here in
this section of the book is the American medical students
who come to Paris. There are people like James Jackson Jr.
Mason Warren Oliver, Wendell Holmes, and where you really get
to see how they come to Paris and really grow
to love it, and not just the city, but the
(02:36):
things that they're learning there. They get to attend these
awesome lectures, they get to follow these illustrious doctors on
their rounds and see them perform all these all kinds
of procedures. But what really struck me as learning why
they came to Paris to study in the first place.
They came there because the education they could get in
Paris was so far superior to what was available in
(02:58):
America at the time. And it was really compelling this
whole examination of the differences between the two countries in
this respect, and it really became a story of the
history of the medical field both here and there. But
a big folks, a big part of the focus here
was America although it was a story about Paris too,
and so we really wondered how Mr McCullough crafted this
(03:20):
part of the story, how did he choose what to
keep in and how much to leave out. So here's
what he had to say about that, Well, that I
could have written an entire book on just that subject.
I could have written an entire book on the friendship
and the adversities they faced between uh. Uh John Samuel
(03:40):
left B. Morris and James Ventimore Cooper. Uh. I could
have written a whole easily, a whole book about Hellihu
Washburn and his experiences. But I think in many ways,
of all the subjects that I had to happily undertake
in this book, the story of those medical students has
(04:04):
stayed with me. Has um strengthened my understanding of the
times better than anything. Uh. There are several aspects of it.
That particular subject also, as you just suggested, illustrates not
(04:24):
just where France was in development of medical training and
in the practice of medicine, but how far back behind
we were. And this is the case. In all of
these subjects, you're learning about where we stood proportioned to
the rest of the world, which I think is a
healthy reminder in the for example, that we had fewer
medical schools than there were states in the country. That
(04:47):
most of the doctors in our country, this is in
the eighteen thirties, eighteen forties, really right up through the
our Civil War, most of the doctors never went to
medical school at all. They were trained by other doctors,
most of whom have never on a medical school. Uh.
Medical students didn't make the rounds of hospitals as part
of their training. Cadavers for dissection dissecting purposes were illegal
(05:12):
in many states. Consequently, the bodies that were available were
available in the black market, which meant they were very expensive.
Which also meant that most medical students never got to
dissect a human arm. First time they would ever start
dissecting a human arm was on a living person, and
at that time there was no not yet any anesthetic.
(05:36):
Ether doesn't didn't commit until late eighteen forties. UH. The
fact that most American women in that day would have
preferred to die, literally would have preferred to die that
I have a man examined their body. And since all
doctors at that point were men, that meant a great
many of these women died. It also meant that students
(05:59):
never got to examine or make the rounds with a
practicing physician, a teaching position of female patients over half
the popular human population, so that when they began practicing medicine,
they knew next to nothing except what they had read
in books about the female anatomy, the whole process of birth,
(06:21):
and the rest. And there were none of those social
stigmas in France, either concerning the availability of cadavers for
this dissection or the examination of the female anatomy. And
so as Pauliver went to Holmes said in one of
(06:43):
his letters to his parents he could learn more in
two years there than he could in ten years practicing
medicine at home. So it's really interesting to learn about
how he did craft that story within a story. And
I think to Blie, if that was your favorite part,
mine was the account of the American minister in Paris
Lahu Washburn, And I mean, it's it's just again, it
(07:04):
is a story within a story. It's kind of this
gripping central chapter in the middle of the book. But
what really interested me about it, I mean, I enjoyed
it so much that I flipped to the back of
the book and started reading the source notes, and I
came across a little note that mentioned this was an
entirely new story. This, this journal, this account of Washburn's
(07:28):
was was new to historians, and so we clearly wanted
to ask Mr McCulloch not only about how he felt
about Washburn's account, but how the account came to light
in the first place. And here's what he had to say.
I should say that I have been writing books now
for more than forty years, and I have had the
(07:50):
good fortune to come across material um of of surprising
kind that had not been known before, both in quantity
and and in small parts and pieces, and some of
it has been very exciting. But never has there been
anything quite like this. Eli Hu Washburn, our ambassador to Paris,
(08:15):
arrived on the eve of the Franco Prussian War, and
the Franco Prussian War, which started in the summer of
eight seventy was a disastrous mistake on the part of
the French and really totally unnecessary for Europe, and the
German army very swiftly defeated the French army and marched
(08:38):
on Paris, surrounded Paris, kept Paris under siege, and proceeded
the star of the city. In this submission, eli U
Washburn was the only minister, diplomatic representative of a major
power who, of his own choice, stayed on, did not
(08:58):
get out of the city, did not leave. All the
others left, but he felt it was his duty, because
there were Americans still in the city, to go through
it all. After the siege ended nearly five months later,
there was a brief period of comparative peace, and then
all of a sudden, a horrific civil war broke out
(09:20):
in Paris, French killing French uh to a degree that's
hard to imagine. It was as if all the latent evil, violence, sadism,
and destruction that's part of the part of the human
nature erupted like a volcano. And to have it happened
(09:42):
in this most civilized of all cities, this most um temperate,
supposedly and educated, cultivated population, made it all the more
god awful. Well again, wash Burned stayed through the duration
of it. And if he had done only that, we
(10:05):
would he would he would be somebody we should need
to know more about. But he kept a diary every
single day, and that diary has been unknown up until
just recently, as part of the process of work on
this book, my research assistant might Kill found the diary,
(10:28):
or rather a letter press copy of the diary, in
of all places, the Library of Congress, where nobody knew
about it. We then managed to trace the location of
the original diary, which is up in Livermore, Maine, where
Washburn came from. And so I was able to tell
(10:51):
the story of this terrible tragedy, this this bloody, violent
spasm that Paris went through. Yeah, from an eyewitness, eye
witness account that's not only new but is Fulsome these
aren't just little jottings at the end of each terrific
day that he went through, their long takeouts. The whole
(11:14):
text transcribed runs to more than sixty pages, and that
that diary alone is a window on those times such
as we've not known about before. And that's part of
the excitement of doing history. New things do come to light,
(11:36):
New treasures in the way of letters, diaries, memoirs are found,
and not just in a trunk and in somebody's attic,
but in some of the great repositories of treasures that
are known to everyone. So it's so cool to hear
Mr McCullough talk about the joys of being a historian
(11:58):
and talking about these little treasures like finding Washburn's journal.
But it's even more interesting when you consider that McCullough
didn't start out as a historian. He was born and
raised in Pittsburgh, went to Yale, and I think I
read that his first love was actually art, and then
while he was at school he got inspired to write,
and he actually started as a journalist career wise, so
(12:20):
we wanted to know how he got his start as
a historian. And here's what he said. Yes, I started
out as a writer for magazine's Time in Life, and
then I went to Washington during the Kennedy administration, who
added a magazine for the Arab World. And I was
young and very much over my head and trying to
do seven things at once and to learn as fast
(12:43):
as I could, And part of the way I coped
with it was to work on Saturdays. And one Saturday,
with the help of my wife, rose Leye, I was
at the Library of Congress looking for material for a
piece that we were going to illustrate in the magazine
for the Arab World, and quite by chance, saw a
(13:05):
collection of photographs taken in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, after the terrible,
disastrous flood of I mean, I had grown up in
western Pennsylvania. I had heard about it much of my life,
Johnstown Flood, but I really didn't know what happened. And
when I saw the the scale of the of the
(13:27):
destruction and damage, the human tragedy of it in those photographs,
I simply wanted to know more about it. What happened?
How did this come to be? And I took a
book out of the library and it wasn't very good.
I had a number of questions that it didn't answer,
(13:48):
And so I took another book out and if anything,
it was even it was even less satisfactory. And so
I to myself, why don't you try to write the
book that you'd like to read? And once I started
doing the research, once I got involved, got my hands
(14:09):
dirty in the in the archives and the rest, I
knew that that was what that was the kind of
work I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
And that was more than more than forty years ago.
So I really liked Mr McCullough's idea that he writes
the book he wants to read. I think that's a
that's a great way to pick your topic. And I
(14:31):
had read earlier that that's really kind of how he
settled on many of the topics he's written about just
personal interests. There wasn't enough information out there to read
in an easy book for him when went out and
decided to write it himself. So it certainly made us
wonder what else was on his to read list, as
(14:51):
in what other books did he want to get out
there and write and research, And we asked him about that.
I keep it list sort of marketing list, if you will,
of ideas, and I guess the list probably numbers different
(15:13):
ideas at the momentum which of those I may pursue
or whether some other idea will suddenly pop into into
focus because of something someone says in a conversation such
as we're having or something I read. I don't know yet,
(15:35):
um I I love the adventure of finding out. It's
like working on a detective case. And the wonderful thing
about our human nature is a curiosity, which is is
accelerative like gravity. The more we know, the more we
(15:57):
want to know, Thank goodness. So I've never undertaken a
book about which I was an ex subject about which
I was an expert. If I were an expert on
the subject, I really wouldn't want to write the book
because I already know the subject. I love the idea
of landing in a foreign continent or a feeling of
(16:18):
starting off and thinking this is going to take me three, four,
maybe six years. But think how much am I gonna
I'm gonna learn that? To me, I'm an I'm not
a train trains the story. And I was an English major.
I thought I would wind up writing I don't know
novels or plays. Um, but I love to read history.
(16:39):
And when I started reading compelling history by people like
Shelby Foote or Barbara Tuckman, I thought maybe maybe I
could do that. Um. It's it's so important for people,
if all possible, to do work that they love, and
(17:04):
to work with in the field where you are with
people of a kind and help you to grow and
broaden your outlook. I I'm always glad, of course, when
my books have h welcoming readership. I'm always pleased when
(17:29):
people tell me how much they like this or that
that I've written about. But the real reward, the real
prize that goes with it, is the work itself, and
so I'm always a little sorry, a little down when
it's over. And now for that really selfish question that
(17:50):
we mentioned before, not just for us, of course, but
for our listeners to We know that many of you
out there are amateur historians, were professional history perfect sational ones.
Maybe you studied history, maybe you didn't, Maybe you work
as an editor like us, or maybe you work as
an accountant or somebody something entirely different. But we wanted
to know Mr McCullough's personal advice for turning history from
(18:13):
just an interest or a passion into a profession. And
he did us one better. He gave us a five
point step by step list, and here it is. Oh
I could I could really talk to you for a
long time about that, And it's a wonderful chance to
tell I hope some of your listeners a few things
(18:34):
that I wish I had been told when I was starting.
One is, be sure you pick a subject for which
there is more material then you think you're going to need.
Because you do need more material. I would say the
ratio is probably twenty to one of what you accumulate
(18:56):
what you know to what you finally put down on paper.
It has to be that way. Uh. The second thing
is to pick a subject that has a real story,
and wherein the characters in the story, the protagonists and
(19:17):
the secondary figures recorded what they saw, said, did so forth.
An awful lot of life is talk. An awful lot
of type of life is expressing the human um, the
(19:39):
human side of our nature. Uh, dark or light uh
in language. And you can't make that up if you're
writing honest biography and history. You can't make up dialogue.
I don't like to read and in a book of
history or biography that as the as he walked from
(20:01):
the old Executive Office building over to the White House,
he was thinking about this or that. We have no
idea what he might have been thinking about. Um. You
have to you have to take it out of what's
in the record as having been said, either in letters, diaries,
or quotations, from transcriptions of trials, court transition transition transcriptions,
(20:25):
or from newspaper interviews or accounts. You have to have
a source. So you want to pick a subject for
which there's lots and lots of material to work with.
Think of it as processing or to make steel. You
need an awful lot of it to make the steel.
And secondly, when you go to a library, or maybe
(20:47):
this is thirdly, when you go to a library or
an archive, remember that it isn't just the books that
are in that library, or the rare letters or diaries
in that library, or the apps or the photographs that
are of value. It's the librarians or the archivists. Talk
(21:07):
to them, Tell them what you're working on, have them
think about where you would best look or what you
need to know. That's why they're there, that's their job.
I think one of the mistakes students and others make
is they try to hide because they don't want to
be embarrassed by it. They try to hide how much
they don't know. Be very candid about what you don't know,
(21:32):
what you're trying to find out, and that you need help,
and time and again, those wonderful people that are in
libraries and professionals and archivists will not only help you
at that moment, but they'll call you up two years
later to say, remember that question you asked me or
that subject you were trying to find out more, But
(21:53):
I just found something I think you will really be
interested in. I can't tell you how many times that's
happened to me. How indebted I have been to those
who helped that way professionally. The other thing is asked
questions of all kinds of people. Don't hide what you're
working on, don't keep it a secret. Talk to everybody
(22:13):
you can about it, because you never know who knows
something that might be of help to you, that might
be beneficial. And work. Get down, sit down and start writing.
Don't try to do all the research and then write
the book. Start writing when you think you've done maybe
a third of the research, because it's when you're writing
(22:33):
that you begin to realize exactly how much you don't
know and need to know. So therefore it targets your
research more efficiently. And so i've i've I'm doing research
all the time, from beginning to end. Uh, very often
doing research. When the books in galleys or even page groups,
(22:56):
I'm still doing research. And that's that's part of the kicks,
that's part of the fun. The hard part is to
tell yourself to stop re searching, because it is addictive,
and you have to say, I got to start writing
and just sit down. And my my advice is started
at the beginning and and just proceed work every day.
(23:20):
Don't don't put it off. It's easier if you work
every day. So I know, Deablina and I were trying
to take down notes while we were talking to him
about these five tips and try to apply them immediately
to our work. But I hope that they're also helpful
to you guys out there who want to do more
historical research yourself. And also I was kind of inspired
(23:43):
by what he told us to about picking his career
and doing something he really liked. It was it was
great to hear from from somebody, and here's such kind
of inspirational words. Yeah, and just that idea of creating something,
you know, how he wanted to read something or see
something out there and he couldn't find it and so
(24:04):
he created himself. I mean, to me, that was the
most inspirational part of it. It's just you know, having
that motivation to do it. So hopefully we can all
find a little bit of that. Definitely, So this is
our second podcast of this interview, but we are definitely
willing to keep the conversation going through social media through
our blogs, which are on the how Stuff Works homepage
(24:26):
at www dot how stuff works dot com, also on Twitter,
misst in History also on Facebook. So if you guys
have picked up their book by this point and read
a little bit, you can definitely email us or or
comment in some way and share your thoughts and we'd
love to hear from you. Yes, we would love to
know how you felt about the book, what parts were
(24:48):
your favorites. You can write us at history podcast at
how stuff works dot com, or you can look us
up on social media, Sarah said. And if you want
to find our blogs, you can find them by searching
off our homepage for them. Our homepagees www dot how
stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our
(25:09):
new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how staff
Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing
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Download it today on iTunes
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm far A Dowdy and I'm to bling a charcoal
boarding And this time we're going to pick up with
an interview we conducted earlier this summer with author David McCullough.
(00:21):
We got to talk to him about his new book,
The Greater Journey Americans in Paris, And during the first
half of this interview we really kind of just talked
about the book and how it was almost an unusual
style of book. It covers so many people, so many
different Americans who travel to Paris during this long nearly
hundred years span of time and accomplish a lot um.
(00:44):
And we also got to talk to him then a
little bit about his research specifically for this book, of
a lot of it surprisingly took place here state side. Yeah,
we talked to him about some things like his inspiration,
how he picked his protagonists, um, a lot of questions
that focused on the book specifically. But we stopped the
first part of the interview there knowing that we had
(01:07):
more to give you guys, but we wanted to give
people a chance to pick up the book and be
able to read it first, and we didn't want to
give too much away, and we wanted Mr McCullough's words
here to be able to kind of add a little
bit of context to to what you got from the
book and what you already knew. And also selfishly, we
wanted to be able to take the chance to talk
to him a little bit more about his own process,
(01:29):
what really inspires him and how he does his research
and puts a book together. Not too selfishly though, because
I think it's really going to help all of you
guys out there who are historians, are amateur historians, are
just interested in conducting your own research. He gave us
some really really great tips. If we're gonna tease you
guys a little bit here at the beginning of this interview, Yeah,
(01:51):
So basically, even if you haven't read the book, I
think you'll really enjoy this part of the interview. But
that comes later, and first we're going to get back
to a greater journey. So the part of the book
that I was most eager to talk about and to
hear the author talk about was a chapter called the Medicals.
In it, as the title suggests, Mr McCullough focuses on
the this little world within a world of the greater book,
(02:15):
and it features hospitals, famous doctors, patients of course, with
all sorts of ailments. But his main focus here in
this section of the book is the American medical students
who come to Paris. There are people like James Jackson Jr.
Mason Warren Oliver, Wendell Holmes, and where you really get
to see how they come to Paris and really grow
to love it, and not just the city, but the
(02:36):
things that they're learning there. They get to attend these
awesome lectures, they get to follow these illustrious doctors on
their rounds and see them perform all these all kinds
of procedures. But what really struck me as learning why
they came to Paris to study in the first place.
They came there because the education they could get in
Paris was so far superior to what was available in
(02:58):
America at the time. And it was really compelling this
whole examination of the differences between the two countries in
this respect, and it really became a story of the
history of the medical field both here and there. But
a big folks, a big part of the focus here
was America although it was a story about Paris too,
and so we really wondered how Mr McCullough crafted this
(03:20):
part of the story, how did he choose what to
keep in and how much to leave out. So here's
what he had to say about that, Well, that I
could have written an entire book on just that subject.
I could have written an entire book on the friendship
and the adversities they faced between uh. Uh John Samuel
(03:40):
left B. Morris and James Ventimore Cooper. Uh. I could
have written a whole easily, a whole book about Hellihu
Washburn and his experiences. But I think in many ways,
of all the subjects that I had to happily undertake
in this book, the story of those medical students has
(04:04):
stayed with me. Has um strengthened my understanding of the
times better than anything. Uh. There are several aspects of it.
That particular subject also, as you just suggested, illustrates not
(04:24):
just where France was in development of medical training and
in the practice of medicine, but how far back behind
we were. And this is the case. In all of
these subjects, you're learning about where we stood proportioned to
the rest of the world, which I think is a
healthy reminder in the for example, that we had fewer
medical schools than there were states in the country. That
(04:47):
most of the doctors in our country, this is in
the eighteen thirties, eighteen forties, really right up through the
our Civil War, most of the doctors never went to
medical school at all. They were trained by other doctors,
most of whom have never on a medical school. Uh.
Medical students didn't make the rounds of hospitals as part
of their training. Cadavers for dissection dissecting purposes were illegal
(05:12):
in many states. Consequently, the bodies that were available were
available in the black market, which meant they were very expensive.
Which also meant that most medical students never got to
dissect a human arm. First time they would ever start
dissecting a human arm was on a living person, and
at that time there was no not yet any anesthetic.
(05:36):
Ether doesn't didn't commit until late eighteen forties. UH. The
fact that most American women in that day would have
preferred to die, literally would have preferred to die that
I have a man examined their body. And since all
doctors at that point were men, that meant a great
many of these women died. It also meant that students
(05:59):
never got to examine or make the rounds with a
practicing physician, a teaching position of female patients over half
the popular human population, so that when they began practicing medicine,
they knew next to nothing except what they had read
in books about the female anatomy, the whole process of birth,
(06:21):
and the rest. And there were none of those social
stigmas in France, either concerning the availability of cadavers for
this dissection or the examination of the female anatomy. And
so as Pauliver went to Holmes said in one of
(06:43):
his letters to his parents he could learn more in
two years there than he could in ten years practicing
medicine at home. So it's really interesting to learn about
how he did craft that story within a story. And
I think to Blie, if that was your favorite part,
mine was the account of the American minister in Paris
Lahu Washburn, And I mean, it's it's just again, it
(07:04):
is a story within a story. It's kind of this
gripping central chapter in the middle of the book. But
what really interested me about it, I mean, I enjoyed
it so much that I flipped to the back of
the book and started reading the source notes, and I
came across a little note that mentioned this was an
entirely new story. This, this journal, this account of Washburn's
(07:28):
was was new to historians, and so we clearly wanted
to ask Mr McCulloch not only about how he felt
about Washburn's account, but how the account came to light
in the first place. And here's what he had to say.
I should say that I have been writing books now
for more than forty years, and I have had the
(07:50):
good fortune to come across material um of of surprising
kind that had not been known before, both in quantity
and and in small parts and pieces, and some of
it has been very exciting. But never has there been
anything quite like this. Eli Hu Washburn, our ambassador to Paris,
(08:15):
arrived on the eve of the Franco Prussian War, and
the Franco Prussian War, which started in the summer of
eight seventy was a disastrous mistake on the part of
the French and really totally unnecessary for Europe, and the
German army very swiftly defeated the French army and marched
(08:38):
on Paris, surrounded Paris, kept Paris under siege, and proceeded
the star of the city. In this submission, eli U
Washburn was the only minister, diplomatic representative of a major
power who, of his own choice, stayed on, did not
(08:58):
get out of the city, did not leave. All the
others left, but he felt it was his duty, because
there were Americans still in the city, to go through
it all. After the siege ended nearly five months later,
there was a brief period of comparative peace, and then
all of a sudden, a horrific civil war broke out
(09:20):
in Paris, French killing French uh to a degree that's
hard to imagine. It was as if all the latent evil, violence, sadism,
and destruction that's part of the part of the human
nature erupted like a volcano. And to have it happened
(09:42):
in this most civilized of all cities, this most um temperate,
supposedly and educated, cultivated population, made it all the more
god awful. Well again, wash Burned stayed through the duration
of it. And if he had done only that, we
(10:05):
would he would he would be somebody we should need
to know more about. But he kept a diary every
single day, and that diary has been unknown up until
just recently, as part of the process of work on
this book, my research assistant might Kill found the diary,
(10:28):
or rather a letter press copy of the diary, in
of all places, the Library of Congress, where nobody knew
about it. We then managed to trace the location of
the original diary, which is up in Livermore, Maine, where
Washburn came from. And so I was able to tell
(10:51):
the story of this terrible tragedy, this this bloody, violent
spasm that Paris went through. Yeah, from an eyewitness, eye
witness account that's not only new but is Fulsome these
aren't just little jottings at the end of each terrific
day that he went through, their long takeouts. The whole
(11:14):
text transcribed runs to more than sixty pages, and that
that diary alone is a window on those times such
as we've not known about before. And that's part of
the excitement of doing history. New things do come to light,
(11:36):
New treasures in the way of letters, diaries, memoirs are found,
and not just in a trunk and in somebody's attic,
but in some of the great repositories of treasures that
are known to everyone. So it's so cool to hear
Mr McCullough talk about the joys of being a historian
(11:58):
and talking about these little treasures like finding Washburn's journal.
But it's even more interesting when you consider that McCullough
didn't start out as a historian. He was born and
raised in Pittsburgh, went to Yale, and I think I
read that his first love was actually art, and then
while he was at school he got inspired to write,
and he actually started as a journalist career wise, so
(12:20):
we wanted to know how he got his start as
a historian. And here's what he said. Yes, I started
out as a writer for magazine's Time in Life, and
then I went to Washington during the Kennedy administration, who
added a magazine for the Arab World. And I was
young and very much over my head and trying to
do seven things at once and to learn as fast
(12:43):
as I could, And part of the way I coped
with it was to work on Saturdays. And one Saturday,
with the help of my wife, rose Leye, I was
at the Library of Congress looking for material for a
piece that we were going to illustrate in the magazine
for the Arab World, and quite by chance, saw a
(13:05):
collection of photographs taken in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, after the terrible,
disastrous flood of I mean, I had grown up in
western Pennsylvania. I had heard about it much of my life,
Johnstown Flood, but I really didn't know what happened. And
when I saw the the scale of the of the
(13:27):
destruction and damage, the human tragedy of it in those photographs,
I simply wanted to know more about it. What happened?
How did this come to be? And I took a
book out of the library and it wasn't very good.
I had a number of questions that it didn't answer,
(13:48):
And so I took another book out and if anything,
it was even it was even less satisfactory. And so
I to myself, why don't you try to write the
book that you'd like to read? And once I started
doing the research, once I got involved, got my hands
(14:09):
dirty in the in the archives and the rest, I
knew that that was what that was the kind of
work I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
And that was more than more than forty years ago.
So I really liked Mr McCullough's idea that he writes
the book he wants to read. I think that's a
that's a great way to pick your topic. And I
(14:31):
had read earlier that that's really kind of how he
settled on many of the topics he's written about just
personal interests. There wasn't enough information out there to read
in an easy book for him when went out and
decided to write it himself. So it certainly made us
wonder what else was on his to read list, as
(14:51):
in what other books did he want to get out
there and write and research, And we asked him about that.
I keep it list sort of marketing list, if you will,
of ideas, and I guess the list probably numbers different
(15:13):
ideas at the momentum which of those I may pursue
or whether some other idea will suddenly pop into into
focus because of something someone says in a conversation such
as we're having or something I read. I don't know yet,
(15:35):
um I I love the adventure of finding out. It's
like working on a detective case. And the wonderful thing
about our human nature is a curiosity, which is is
accelerative like gravity. The more we know, the more we
(15:57):
want to know, Thank goodness. So I've never undertaken a
book about which I was an ex subject about which
I was an expert. If I were an expert on
the subject, I really wouldn't want to write the book
because I already know the subject. I love the idea
of landing in a foreign continent or a feeling of
(16:18):
starting off and thinking this is going to take me three, four,
maybe six years. But think how much am I gonna
I'm gonna learn that? To me, I'm an I'm not
a train trains the story. And I was an English major.
I thought I would wind up writing I don't know
novels or plays. Um, but I love to read history.
(16:39):
And when I started reading compelling history by people like
Shelby Foote or Barbara Tuckman, I thought maybe maybe I
could do that. Um. It's it's so important for people,
if all possible, to do work that they love, and
(17:04):
to work with in the field where you are with
people of a kind and help you to grow and
broaden your outlook. I I'm always glad, of course, when
my books have h welcoming readership. I'm always pleased when
(17:29):
people tell me how much they like this or that
that I've written about. But the real reward, the real
prize that goes with it, is the work itself, and
so I'm always a little sorry, a little down when
it's over. And now for that really selfish question that
(17:50):
we mentioned before, not just for us, of course, but
for our listeners to We know that many of you
out there are amateur historians, were professional history perfect sational ones.
Maybe you studied history, maybe you didn't, Maybe you work
as an editor like us, or maybe you work as
an accountant or somebody something entirely different. But we wanted
to know Mr McCullough's personal advice for turning history from
(18:13):
just an interest or a passion into a profession. And
he did us one better. He gave us a five
point step by step list, and here it is. Oh
I could I could really talk to you for a
long time about that, And it's a wonderful chance to
tell I hope some of your listeners a few things
(18:34):
that I wish I had been told when I was starting.
One is, be sure you pick a subject for which
there is more material then you think you're going to need.
Because you do need more material. I would say the
ratio is probably twenty to one of what you accumulate
(18:56):
what you know to what you finally put down on paper.
It has to be that way. Uh. The second thing
is to pick a subject that has a real story,
and wherein the characters in the story, the protagonists and
(19:17):
the secondary figures recorded what they saw, said, did so forth.
An awful lot of life is talk. An awful lot
of type of life is expressing the human um, the
(19:39):
human side of our nature. Uh, dark or light uh
in language. And you can't make that up if you're
writing honest biography and history. You can't make up dialogue.
I don't like to read and in a book of
history or biography that as the as he walked from
(20:01):
the old Executive Office building over to the White House,
he was thinking about this or that. We have no
idea what he might have been thinking about. Um. You
have to you have to take it out of what's
in the record as having been said, either in letters, diaries,
or quotations, from transcriptions of trials, court transition transition transcriptions,
(20:25):
or from newspaper interviews or accounts. You have to have
a source. So you want to pick a subject for
which there's lots and lots of material to work with.
Think of it as processing or to make steel. You
need an awful lot of it to make the steel.
And secondly, when you go to a library, or maybe
(20:47):
this is thirdly, when you go to a library or
an archive, remember that it isn't just the books that
are in that library, or the rare letters or diaries
in that library, or the apps or the photographs that
are of value. It's the librarians or the archivists. Talk
(21:07):
to them, Tell them what you're working on, have them
think about where you would best look or what you
need to know. That's why they're there, that's their job.
I think one of the mistakes students and others make
is they try to hide because they don't want to
be embarrassed by it. They try to hide how much
they don't know. Be very candid about what you don't know,
(21:32):
what you're trying to find out, and that you need help,
and time and again, those wonderful people that are in
libraries and professionals and archivists will not only help you
at that moment, but they'll call you up two years
later to say, remember that question you asked me or
that subject you were trying to find out more, But
(21:53):
I just found something I think you will really be
interested in. I can't tell you how many times that's
happened to me. How indebted I have been to those
who helped that way professionally. The other thing is asked
questions of all kinds of people. Don't hide what you're
working on, don't keep it a secret. Talk to everybody
(22:13):
you can about it, because you never know who knows
something that might be of help to you, that might
be beneficial. And work. Get down, sit down and start writing.
Don't try to do all the research and then write
the book. Start writing when you think you've done maybe
a third of the research, because it's when you're writing
(22:33):
that you begin to realize exactly how much you don't
know and need to know. So therefore it targets your
research more efficiently. And so i've i've I'm doing research
all the time, from beginning to end. Uh, very often
doing research. When the books in galleys or even page groups,
(22:56):
I'm still doing research. And that's that's part of the kicks,
that's part of the fun. The hard part is to
tell yourself to stop re searching, because it is addictive,
and you have to say, I got to start writing
and just sit down. And my my advice is started
at the beginning and and just proceed work every day.
(23:20):
Don't don't put it off. It's easier if you work
every day. So I know, Deablina and I were trying
to take down notes while we were talking to him
about these five tips and try to apply them immediately
to our work. But I hope that they're also helpful
to you guys out there who want to do more
historical research yourself. And also I was kind of inspired
(23:43):
by what he told us to about picking his career
and doing something he really liked. It was it was
great to hear from from somebody, and here's such kind
of inspirational words. Yeah, and just that idea of creating something,
you know, how he wanted to read something or see
something out there and he couldn't find it and so
(24:04):
he created himself. I mean, to me, that was the
most inspirational part of it. It's just you know, having
that motivation to do it. So hopefully we can all
find a little bit of that. Definitely, So this is
our second podcast of this interview, but we are definitely
willing to keep the conversation going through social media through
our blogs, which are on the how Stuff Works homepage
(24:26):
at www dot how stuff works dot com, also on Twitter,
misst in History also on Facebook. So if you guys
have picked up their book by this point and read
a little bit, you can definitely email us or or
comment in some way and share your thoughts and we'd
love to hear from you. Yes, we would love to
know how you felt about the book, what parts were
(24:48):
your favorites. You can write us at history podcast at
how stuff works dot com, or you can look us
up on social media, Sarah said. And if you want
to find our blogs, you can find them by searching
off our homepage for them. Our homepagees www dot how
stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our
(25:09):
new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how staff
Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing
possibilities of tomorrow. The houst Works iPhone app has a rise.
Download it today on iTunes
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