August 6, 2025 • 20 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, historian David McCullough made millions care about a year most only saw in textbooks—1776. Long before it became shorthand for American independence, 1776 was marked by hesitation, failure, and risk—and McCullough understood that better than most. In this public appearance, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner reflects on how the Revolutionary War unfolded, what the Declaration of Independence actually meant at the time, and why some of the most important moments in U.S. history are often the least understood. We’d like to thank the U.S. National Archives for granting us access to this audio.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories. Up next. Best
selling historian and two time polit Serprize winner David McCullough.
The late David McCullough is the author of seventeen seventy six.
In this master work, he tells the intensely human story
of those who marched with George Washington, General George Washington
(00:32):
in the year of the Declaration of Independence, beginning in
seventeen seventy five. Here he is telling the story of
how American history is taught today.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Let's take a listen.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
There are wonderful teachers of history, and in many places
history is being taught extremely effectively. But that the blunt
truth is that in our public schools nationwide, WI, you
have been doing an abysmal job of teaching history. It's
been a long time since the Bradley Report, which fell
(01:06):
all this out very clearly, there have been surveys and
studies since. A survey conducted by the American the Council
of American Alumni here in Washington was filling out a
questionnaire by seniors only seniors on what were called the
(01:29):
fifty best universities and colleges in the country, and the
results were very discouraging the performance was less than what
it would have been at the high school level twenty
five years ago. A question nineteen who was the commanding
Who was the American commanding officer at the surrender of
(01:52):
Cornwallis at Yorktown? More people, more of these college seniors
and their best schools at colleges and universities answered Ulysses S.
Grant then answered George Washington, and six percent of them
said it was Douglas MacArthur, which shows they didn't know
(02:13):
they were guessing.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
They're guessing.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
I could tell you at length incidents that I've known
when I've been lecturing or serving as a visiting professor
or lecturer at colleges and universities. You know very well.
It's striking, it's appalling, but it's curable. And I think
(02:43):
the problem is at the core of the problem is
that we're not teaching our teachers as effectively as we
need to. We're graduating too many teachers with degrees in
education who don't know any subject. They have had no
major other than education. And there's good signs that several
(03:03):
universities are changing that SMU now has always required that
you have to major in a subject if you want
to teach. The University of Oklahoma now requires that one
major in a subject if you want to teach, and
this is a big step in the right direction. Now,
if a teacher doesn't know her subject, his subject, that
(03:23):
obviously makes it difficult to teach that subject. But you
can't love something you don't know any more than you
can love someone you don't know. And we all remember
from our own experience, those teachers who meant the most,
who inspired us, who threw open the window and gave
us a whole new inspiration or idea about the possibilities
(03:47):
of learning, were the teachers who loved what they were
teaching and conveyed that enthusiasm.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Ms.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
Schmeltz in sixth grade, he said, come over here and
look in this microscope. You're going to get a kick
out of this. My high school history teachers, Robert Abercrombie,
Walter Jones, they were marveless teachers because they loved what
they were teaching. There was a terrific teacher of teachers
(04:15):
at the University of Pittsburgh, Margaret McFarland, who was, among
other things, the great mentor of Fred Rogers. Mister Rogers
who reached more children than any teacher who ever lived.
And he would he said so that Margaret. Everything he
did in his programs based on the teachings of Margaret
MacFarland and Margaret McFarland said. Attitudes aren't taught, they're caught.
(04:39):
It's the attitude of the teacher that's caught, and that's
what matters most. Show them what you love, she would
tell teachers, and advice of how to do it. Also,
if a teacher doesn't know what she's teaching, she's therefore
more dependent on the textbooks. And while we have some
superb textbooks, most of them are far from superb. Many
(05:01):
of them are so dreary, so boring, so lifeless, it's
as if they were designed to kill any interest that
you might have in history. There are certain basic ideas,
it seems to me, which are essential in writing history
(05:24):
and teaching history. And one is to convey the sense
that nothing ever had to happen the way it happened,
That events could have gone off in any number of
different ways, for any number of different reasons, at a
variety of points all along the way. Nothing was ever
on a track. We're taught history that this followed, this followed, that,
(05:44):
and that followed that, and we begin to think that
that's how it had to be. It never had to be,
nor was anyone ever aware of how things would turn out.
The expression the foreseeable future ought to be dropped. There's
no such thing as the foreseeable future, anymore than there's
any such thing as the self made man or the
(06:06):
self made woman.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
We are all the.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
Results of many people who have helped us, inspired us,
corrected us, reprimanded us, given us encouragement when we need it.
And we know who they were, parents, teachers, friends, But
often they are people we've never known because they lived
in another time, they lived long ago, and they may
(06:31):
have written the the symphony that moves us to our souls.
They may have written the laws that we enjoy as
among the blessings of this country. They may have been poets,
they may have been great masters of literature or painting,
and they have shaped us. They've shaped us with their vocabulary.
(06:55):
All of us walk around every day unknowingly quoting shapekespeare Savantes,
Pope swift, and we think this is just the way
we talk, unknowing that these all come from a long
tradition of the Great English language. And too few. It
seems to me understand the degree to which we have
(07:18):
been shaped by those who created this country, and not
just the founders, but the people whose lives and whose
fortunes and whose sacred honor was on the line, but
whose names mean nothing to us. They were anonymous or
largely anonymous, even in their own time. But they were there,
(07:42):
and they did heroic and sometimes extraordinarily unprecedented acts which
have made possible.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
How we live.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
Abigail Adams, in a letter to her husband written from
Quinsy when he was in Philadelphia's seventeen seventy six, said,
future generations which will reap the blessings will scarcely be
able to conceive the hardships and sufferings of their ancestors.
And in this she was entirely right. Another point to
(08:17):
keep in mind, it seems to me and to Cavey,
and what we teach and what we write about history,
is that, in a very real sense, there was never
any such thing as the past. Nobody ever lived in
the past. Jefferson Adams, Washington. They didn't walk around saying,
isn't this fascinating? Living in the past?
Speaker 2 (08:39):
All right?
Speaker 3 (08:39):
We picturesque in our funny clothes. They lived in the present,
but it was their present, not ours, and they don't
know how it's going to come out any more than
we do. They don't know what's over the horizon.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
And you're listening to the late great David McCullough telling
a story about storytelling, and that is telling the story
of how to tell the story of America and how
so often history is reduced to dry dates, chronology, lifeless,
lifeless explications about this remarkable, remarkable country. When we come
(09:18):
back more of this remarkable storytelling on storytelling itself American history.
Here on our American stories, and we continue with our
(09:40):
American stories. And two time Pulitzer Prize winner David McCullough,
he was giving a talk about seventeen seventy six at
the National Archives. And we pick up now where we
last left off.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
Nobody ever lived in the past, Jefferson Adams, Washington. They
didn't walk around saying, isn't this fascinating? Living in the past.
We picturesque in our funny clothes. They lived in the present.
So when we try to enter into their world, into
their time, into their culture, we must remember that their
(10:16):
present was different from ours. And as a consequence, they
were different from what we are in many ways, more
different than we realized. Yes, of course they were follow
human beings. Yes, of course they had many of the
same emotions and fears and ambitions and the like. But
because they lived in another culture, they of course were different,
(10:39):
and again more different than we often understand.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
Now.
Speaker 3 (10:44):
George Washington has been long perceived as the marble Man,
virtually a demigod, an emblem, a unifying symbol, an icon,
and the rest. And he's very known, he's very approachable,
to use a word in fashion. He had been in
(11:06):
command since the summer of seventeen seventy five. And when
he took command, please understand that he wasn't the George
Washington of the Gilbert Stewart paintings. He wasn't the George
Washington of the powdered hair and the awkward teeth. He
was a young man in the prime of his life
and in spectacular physical condition, six feet two, one hundred
(11:28):
and ninety to two hundred pounds and for all of
forty three years old. And he'd never commanded an army
in battle before in his life. He was new to it.
They were all new to it. And they were all young.
Jefferson thirty three when he wrote the Declaration of Independence,
Adams forty, Hancock thirty nine, Benjamin Rush, one of the
(11:51):
most interesting of them all, was thirty years old when
he signed the Declaration of Independence. Nathaniel Greene, who turned
out to be the best general we had and who
started knowing only what he had read in books, was
a Quaker with a bad limp from his childhood injury,
and he was all of thirty three and been made
a major general, having never set foot on the battlefield
(12:13):
or having served in the war before in his life.
Henry Knox was a big, fat, garrulous Boston bookseller twenty
five years old, and he too, only understood All that
he understood about the military was what he'd.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
Read in books.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
Green had bought most of his books on the military
in Henry Knox's bookshop, and so Henry Knox and green
have become fast friends over books before the war began,
and the fact that they had learned as much as
they had but only from books was never held against them,
because you see, this was the eighteenth century when it
was widely understood that learning things from reading books was
(12:51):
a good idea. Neither Green, nor Knox nor Washington had
more than about a fifth grade education formally, But they
were very intelligent.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
Men, and they never stopped reading.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
Some people say to me often, and I understand how
much of your time has spent on research and how
much it's spent on writing. They almost never say, how
much of your time is spent thinking? And most of
your time is spent thinking, and it should be that way.
(13:37):
My wife, Rosley will say, when I'm in the shower,
say stop writing your book and get out of the shower.
I work every day all day. I find that if
I stay with it every day all day, it's both
more enthralling and easier. I try to at the beginning
(14:01):
read all sort of the basic secondary works on the subject,
but get passed at as quickly as possible into the
primary sources. And I'm trying to write the book I
would like to read. That's really the essence of it.
If the book hasn't been written that I would like
to read, I write it so I can read it.
(14:24):
And I went to a party one night when I
was quite new with this. I'd written one book, but
I had embarked on writing my second book about the
building of the Brooklyn Bridge. And it was a party
in the summer on Martha's Vineyard, where we live, and
I was introduced to a well known Washington socialite of
(14:48):
great importance, and I'd like it s And my host
said to her, I would like you to meet David McCullough.
He's writing a book about the Brooklyn Bridge. And she said,
in a voice that, from my point of view, was
far too loud. Who in the world would ever want
to read a book about the Brooklyn Bridge.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Well? I tried not to show my seething.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
Feelings about her, but on the way home, I think
I was probably punching the dashboard as I drove along.
But I think by the time I got back to
the house, I realized that she'd done me a great favor.
She's right, who would want to read a book about
the Brooklyn Bridge?
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Well? I would? I would.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
And my feeling has always been if I can make
it as interesting as it really was, I'll have achieved.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
What I'm trying to attain.
Speaker 3 (15:50):
Now. I write narrative history, and there are people who
don't think highly.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Of narrative history.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
They think it's not quite the way it ought to be.
That's all right, that's fine, isn't it wonderful? You don't
all have to think alike? I loved historical novels when
I was in my twenties. I read almost all, for example,
the books of Kenneth Roberts, Oliver Wistwell and the rundewn
(16:18):
and wonderful, wonderful novels. But I kept thinking, how much
of this is what happened? How many of these things
that people are saying, did they really say? How many
of these characters actually existed? And I began thinking, it
wouldn't it be wonderful to write something that had the
pull the appeal of these wonderful novels. But yet it
(16:42):
was all true. You couldn't make up anything. You had
to play by the rules that everything had to be
the real thing. No invented dialogue, only what they actually
said in letters and diaries and like. And so that's
what I've been trying to do. And of course I
had many good examples of that spirit, that attitude, one
(17:03):
of whom one of the masters of the form shall
be Foot, whose works on the Civil War are literature.
And I think that's what people who write history, at
least some of us ought to aspire to, because otherwise
no one's going to read it except professional people. And
(17:26):
if no one reads it other than the professionals, I
think history is doomed because it belongs to all of us.
That's the wonder of them. That's what most teachers need
to find out teaching history. Get their hands dirty and
find out the excitement, the detective case, accelerative, accelerative curiosity.
(17:50):
It works for anybody who takes it up. I was
an English major in college. I started off having no
idea how to do it, and you learn by doing.
You can't learn to play the piano without playing the piano.
You can't learn to paint without picking up a brush
and putting some paint on it and going to work.
(18:11):
And it's the same thing with writing history. Dig in,
learn from the experience and enjoy it, because if you're
enjoying it, the people who are going to read what
you wrote and write will enjoy it. And rewrite, rewrite, rewrite,
Learn to edit yourself.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
That's the hardest thing of all.
Speaker 3 (18:33):
Write what you have to say and then put it
aside for a while, and then call upon the editor
you to step in and show that mug, that wrote
this stuff, how it can be fixed. That in many
ways is the most enjoyable part of the whole process
for me. And read it out loud to someone, or
have someone read it out loud to you, because that's
(18:55):
when you begin to hear things.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
That are wrong with it or need to be changed, or.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
Things that need to be added that you don't often
see with your eye. I think we all ought to
read read to each other much more than we do.
I think it's one of the pleasures of life. We
shouldn't just of course we should read to our children
and grandchildren, but we ought to aloud to each other.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
And a terrific job on the production and editing by
our own Greg Hangler. And you've been listening to the
late David McCullough, two time Pooled Serprize winner, telling the
story in essence of his own love affair with history,
and telling the story of how his story came to
be and his affection for this country warts and all,
(19:37):
sins and all. There's a great moment earlier when he said,
you can't love something you don't know. And here at
our American stories, I think that's what we're trying to do,
get you to fall in love with your country, with
so many of the stories you may not know. I
also loved when he said attitudes are caught, not taught.
And if it's one thing you come away from listening
(19:58):
to our American story, it's a sense of gratitude for
all that came before us. The inheritance we have here
in this country was not something we fought for or earned,
and it's ours to pass along to the next generation.
David McCullough here on Now American Stories
And we continue with our American stories. Up next. Best
selling historian and two time polit Serprize winner David McCullough.
The late David McCullough is the author of seventeen seventy six.
In this master work, he tells the intensely human story
of those who marched with George Washington, General George Washington
(00:32):
in the year of the Declaration of Independence, beginning in
seventeen seventy five. Here he is telling the story of
how American history is taught today.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Let's take a listen.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
There are wonderful teachers of history, and in many places
history is being taught extremely effectively. But that the blunt
truth is that in our public schools nationwide, WI, you
have been doing an abysmal job of teaching history. It's
been a long time since the Bradley Report, which fell
(01:06):
all this out very clearly, there have been surveys and
studies since. A survey conducted by the American the Council
of American Alumni here in Washington was filling out a
questionnaire by seniors only seniors on what were called the
(01:29):
fifty best universities and colleges in the country, and the
results were very discouraging the performance was less than what
it would have been at the high school level twenty
five years ago. A question nineteen who was the commanding
Who was the American commanding officer at the surrender of
(01:52):
Cornwallis at Yorktown? More people, more of these college seniors
and their best schools at colleges and universities answered Ulysses S.
Grant then answered George Washington, and six percent of them
said it was Douglas MacArthur, which shows they didn't know
(02:13):
they were guessing.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
They're guessing.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
I could tell you at length incidents that I've known
when I've been lecturing or serving as a visiting professor
or lecturer at colleges and universities. You know very well.
It's striking, it's appalling, but it's curable. And I think
(02:43):
the problem is at the core of the problem is
that we're not teaching our teachers as effectively as we
need to. We're graduating too many teachers with degrees in
education who don't know any subject. They have had no
major other than education. And there's good signs that several
(03:03):
universities are changing that SMU now has always required that
you have to major in a subject if you want
to teach. The University of Oklahoma now requires that one
major in a subject if you want to teach, and
this is a big step in the right direction. Now,
if a teacher doesn't know her subject, his subject, that
(03:23):
obviously makes it difficult to teach that subject. But you
can't love something you don't know any more than you
can love someone you don't know. And we all remember
from our own experience, those teachers who meant the most,
who inspired us, who threw open the window and gave
us a whole new inspiration or idea about the possibilities
(03:47):
of learning, were the teachers who loved what they were
teaching and conveyed that enthusiasm.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Ms.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
Schmeltz in sixth grade, he said, come over here and
look in this microscope. You're going to get a kick
out of this. My high school history teachers, Robert Abercrombie,
Walter Jones, they were marveless teachers because they loved what
they were teaching. There was a terrific teacher of teachers
(04:15):
at the University of Pittsburgh, Margaret McFarland, who was, among
other things, the great mentor of Fred Rogers. Mister Rogers
who reached more children than any teacher who ever lived.
And he would he said so that Margaret. Everything he
did in his programs based on the teachings of Margaret
MacFarland and Margaret McFarland said. Attitudes aren't taught, they're caught.
(04:39):
It's the attitude of the teacher that's caught, and that's
what matters most. Show them what you love, she would
tell teachers, and advice of how to do it. Also,
if a teacher doesn't know what she's teaching, she's therefore
more dependent on the textbooks. And while we have some
superb textbooks, most of them are far from superb. Many
(05:01):
of them are so dreary, so boring, so lifeless, it's
as if they were designed to kill any interest that
you might have in history. There are certain basic ideas,
it seems to me, which are essential in writing history
(05:24):
and teaching history. And one is to convey the sense
that nothing ever had to happen the way it happened,
That events could have gone off in any number of
different ways, for any number of different reasons, at a
variety of points all along the way. Nothing was ever
on a track. We're taught history that this followed, this followed, that,
(05:44):
and that followed that, and we begin to think that
that's how it had to be. It never had to be,
nor was anyone ever aware of how things would turn out.
The expression the foreseeable future ought to be dropped. There's
no such thing as the foreseeable future, anymore than there's
any such thing as the self made man or the
(06:06):
self made woman.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
We are all the.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
Results of many people who have helped us, inspired us,
corrected us, reprimanded us, given us encouragement when we need it.
And we know who they were, parents, teachers, friends, But
often they are people we've never known because they lived
in another time, they lived long ago, and they may
(06:31):
have written the the symphony that moves us to our souls.
They may have written the laws that we enjoy as
among the blessings of this country. They may have been poets,
they may have been great masters of literature or painting,
and they have shaped us. They've shaped us with their vocabulary.
(06:55):
All of us walk around every day unknowingly quoting shapekespeare Savantes,
Pope swift, and we think this is just the way
we talk, unknowing that these all come from a long
tradition of the Great English language. And too few. It
seems to me understand the degree to which we have
(07:18):
been shaped by those who created this country, and not
just the founders, but the people whose lives and whose
fortunes and whose sacred honor was on the line, but
whose names mean nothing to us. They were anonymous or
largely anonymous, even in their own time. But they were there,
(07:42):
and they did heroic and sometimes extraordinarily unprecedented acts which
have made possible.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
How we live.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
Abigail Adams, in a letter to her husband written from
Quinsy when he was in Philadelphia's seventeen seventy six, said,
future generations which will reap the blessings will scarcely be
able to conceive the hardships and sufferings of their ancestors.
And in this she was entirely right. Another point to
(08:17):
keep in mind, it seems to me and to Cavey,
and what we teach and what we write about history,
is that, in a very real sense, there was never
any such thing as the past. Nobody ever lived in
the past. Jefferson Adams, Washington. They didn't walk around saying,
isn't this fascinating? Living in the past?
Speaker 2 (08:39):
All right?
Speaker 3 (08:39):
We picturesque in our funny clothes. They lived in the present,
but it was their present, not ours, and they don't
know how it's going to come out any more than
we do. They don't know what's over the horizon.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
And you're listening to the late great David McCullough telling
a story about storytelling, and that is telling the story
of how to tell the story of America and how
so often history is reduced to dry dates, chronology, lifeless,
lifeless explications about this remarkable, remarkable country. When we come
(09:18):
back more of this remarkable storytelling on storytelling itself American history.
Here on our American stories, and we continue with our
(09:40):
American stories. And two time Pulitzer Prize winner David McCullough,
he was giving a talk about seventeen seventy six at
the National Archives. And we pick up now where we
last left off.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
Nobody ever lived in the past, Jefferson Adams, Washington. They
didn't walk around saying, isn't this fascinating? Living in the past.
We picturesque in our funny clothes. They lived in the present.
So when we try to enter into their world, into
their time, into their culture, we must remember that their
(10:16):
present was different from ours. And as a consequence, they
were different from what we are in many ways, more
different than we realized. Yes, of course they were follow
human beings. Yes, of course they had many of the
same emotions and fears and ambitions and the like. But
because they lived in another culture, they of course were different,
(10:39):
and again more different than we often understand.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
Now.
Speaker 3 (10:44):
George Washington has been long perceived as the marble Man,
virtually a demigod, an emblem, a unifying symbol, an icon,
and the rest. And he's very known, he's very approachable,
to use a word in fashion. He had been in
(11:06):
command since the summer of seventeen seventy five. And when
he took command, please understand that he wasn't the George
Washington of the Gilbert Stewart paintings. He wasn't the George
Washington of the powdered hair and the awkward teeth. He
was a young man in the prime of his life
and in spectacular physical condition, six feet two, one hundred
(11:28):
and ninety to two hundred pounds and for all of
forty three years old. And he'd never commanded an army
in battle before in his life. He was new to it.
They were all new to it. And they were all young.
Jefferson thirty three when he wrote the Declaration of Independence,
Adams forty, Hancock thirty nine, Benjamin Rush, one of the
(11:51):
most interesting of them all, was thirty years old when
he signed the Declaration of Independence. Nathaniel Greene, who turned
out to be the best general we had and who
started knowing only what he had read in books, was
a Quaker with a bad limp from his childhood injury,
and he was all of thirty three and been made
a major general, having never set foot on the battlefield
(12:13):
or having served in the war before in his life.
Henry Knox was a big, fat, garrulous Boston bookseller twenty
five years old, and he too, only understood All that
he understood about the military was what he'd.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
Read in books.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
Green had bought most of his books on the military
in Henry Knox's bookshop, and so Henry Knox and green
have become fast friends over books before the war began,
and the fact that they had learned as much as
they had but only from books was never held against them,
because you see, this was the eighteenth century when it
was widely understood that learning things from reading books was
(12:51):
a good idea. Neither Green, nor Knox nor Washington had
more than about a fifth grade education formally, But they
were very intelligent.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
Men, and they never stopped reading.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
Some people say to me often, and I understand how
much of your time has spent on research and how
much it's spent on writing. They almost never say, how
much of your time is spent thinking? And most of
your time is spent thinking, and it should be that way.
(13:37):
My wife, Rosley will say, when I'm in the shower,
say stop writing your book and get out of the shower.
I work every day all day. I find that if
I stay with it every day all day, it's both
more enthralling and easier. I try to at the beginning
(14:01):
read all sort of the basic secondary works on the subject,
but get passed at as quickly as possible into the
primary sources. And I'm trying to write the book I
would like to read. That's really the essence of it.
If the book hasn't been written that I would like
to read, I write it so I can read it.
(14:24):
And I went to a party one night when I
was quite new with this. I'd written one book, but
I had embarked on writing my second book about the
building of the Brooklyn Bridge. And it was a party
in the summer on Martha's Vineyard, where we live, and
I was introduced to a well known Washington socialite of
(14:48):
great importance, and I'd like it s And my host
said to her, I would like you to meet David McCullough.
He's writing a book about the Brooklyn Bridge. And she said,
in a voice that, from my point of view, was
far too loud. Who in the world would ever want
to read a book about the Brooklyn Bridge.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Well? I tried not to show my seething.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
Feelings about her, but on the way home, I think
I was probably punching the dashboard as I drove along.
But I think by the time I got back to
the house, I realized that she'd done me a great favor.
She's right, who would want to read a book about
the Brooklyn Bridge?
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Well? I would? I would.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
And my feeling has always been if I can make
it as interesting as it really was, I'll have achieved.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
What I'm trying to attain.
Speaker 3 (15:50):
Now. I write narrative history, and there are people who
don't think highly.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Of narrative history.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
They think it's not quite the way it ought to be.
That's all right, that's fine, isn't it wonderful? You don't
all have to think alike? I loved historical novels when
I was in my twenties. I read almost all, for example,
the books of Kenneth Roberts, Oliver Wistwell and the rundewn
(16:18):
and wonderful, wonderful novels. But I kept thinking, how much
of this is what happened? How many of these things
that people are saying, did they really say? How many
of these characters actually existed? And I began thinking, it
wouldn't it be wonderful to write something that had the
pull the appeal of these wonderful novels. But yet it
(16:42):
was all true. You couldn't make up anything. You had
to play by the rules that everything had to be
the real thing. No invented dialogue, only what they actually
said in letters and diaries and like. And so that's
what I've been trying to do. And of course I
had many good examples of that spirit, that attitude, one
(17:03):
of whom one of the masters of the form shall
be Foot, whose works on the Civil War are literature.
And I think that's what people who write history, at
least some of us ought to aspire to, because otherwise
no one's going to read it except professional people. And
(17:26):
if no one reads it other than the professionals, I
think history is doomed because it belongs to all of us.
That's the wonder of them. That's what most teachers need
to find out teaching history. Get their hands dirty and
find out the excitement, the detective case, accelerative, accelerative curiosity.
(17:50):
It works for anybody who takes it up. I was
an English major in college. I started off having no
idea how to do it, and you learn by doing.
You can't learn to play the piano without playing the piano.
You can't learn to paint without picking up a brush
and putting some paint on it and going to work.
(18:11):
And it's the same thing with writing history. Dig in,
learn from the experience and enjoy it, because if you're
enjoying it, the people who are going to read what
you wrote and write will enjoy it. And rewrite, rewrite, rewrite,
Learn to edit yourself.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
That's the hardest thing of all.
Speaker 3 (18:33):
Write what you have to say and then put it
aside for a while, and then call upon the editor
you to step in and show that mug, that wrote
this stuff, how it can be fixed. That in many
ways is the most enjoyable part of the whole process
for me. And read it out loud to someone, or
have someone read it out loud to you, because that's
(18:55):
when you begin to hear things.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
That are wrong with it or need to be changed, or.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
Things that need to be added that you don't often
see with your eye. I think we all ought to
read read to each other much more than we do.
I think it's one of the pleasures of life. We
shouldn't just of course we should read to our children
and grandchildren, but we ought to aloud to each other.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
And a terrific job on the production and editing by
our own Greg Hangler. And you've been listening to the
late David McCullough, two time Pooled Serprize winner, telling the
story in essence of his own love affair with history,
and telling the story of how his story came to
be and his affection for this country warts and all,
(19:37):
sins and all. There's a great moment earlier when he said,
you can't love something you don't know. And here at
our American stories, I think that's what we're trying to do,
get you to fall in love with your country, with
so many of the stories you may not know. I
also loved when he said attitudes are caught, not taught.
And if it's one thing you come away from listening
(19:58):
to our American story, it's a sense of gratitude for
all that came before us. The inheritance we have here
in this country was not something we fought for or earned,
and it's ours to pass along to the next generation.
David McCullough here on Now American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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