David McCullough, Best-Selling Explorer of America’s Past, Dies at 89

[cigaretteman]

David McCullough was a young researcher at the U.S. Information Agency when he walked into the Library of Congress in 1961 and chanced upon a photography exhibit depicting the 1889 flood in Johnstown, Pa., the deadliest in American history.
“I was overwhelmed by the violence revealed in them, the destruction,” Mr. McCullough, who was from the same area of western Pennsylvania, later told the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat. More than 2,200 people died, and a thriving coal-and-steel town was submerged in muddy debris because wealthy industrialists had neglected a dam.
The passage of time had reduced the tragedy to a historical footnote, Mr. McCullough discovered, with little if any serious scholarly study devoted to it. Undaunted by his own inexperience — “I imagined myself being a writer, but never a writer of history,” he said — he set out to write a book about the Johnstown flood.
For years, he dedicated his spare time to his research, interviewing the few remaining survivors to capture their memories of sudden terror, desperate acts of self-preservation and the awful duty, in the aftermath, of identifying the dead.
“The Johnstown Flood,” published in 1968, became a bestseller, rekindled national interest in the disaster and instantly established its author as a historian with an exceptional gift for animating history.
Mr. McCullough, long regarded as a master storyteller of American daring, endeavor and perseverance, died Aug. 7 at his home in Hingham, Mass. He was 89.
His daughter Dorie Lawson confirmed the death but did not cite a specific cause.
In a career spanning more than five decades, Mr. McCullough turned out hugely popular tomes about such subjects as the building of the Panama Canal and the Brooklyn Bridge. He put a spotlight on the largely unknown but extraordinary people who battled disease, bureaucracy and graft to see such awe-inspiring visions accomplished.
His biographies of two underappreciated presidents, John Adams and Harry S. Truman, shone a light on their achievements and earned him two Pulitzer Prizes.
When he turned his attention to the great forces and figures in American history, such as the American Revolution (“1776”) or President Theodore Roosevelt (“Mornings on Horseback”), he brought to life the grand sweep of time and place, as well as the colorful, minute historical details that characterized his widely lauded storytelling skills.
With his sonorous and somber voice, commanding presence and shock of white hair, Mr. McCullough appeared frequently on television series such as PBS’s “American Experience.” He often collaborated with filmmaker Ken Burns and narrated Burns’s Emmy Award-winning documentary series “The Civil War.”
“He’s had a profound influence on all I’ve done because he taught me how to tell a story,” Burns told an audience in 2015.
Mr. McCullough’s honors included two National Book Awards and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, presented in 2006 by George W. Bush.

“History matters. That’s what I’ve tried to convey,” Mr. McCullough told the Patriot Ledger of Quincy, Mass., in 2017. “It’s essential to understand our nation’s story, the good and the bad, the high accomplishments and the skulduggery. And so much of our story has yet to be told.”
For a generation of younger historians, among them Walter Isaacson, Mr. McCullough was a generous mentor as well as an inspiration. “At one point, when I was very young, we were talking about the various founders, and he said, ‘I’ll do John Adams, and you should do Benjamin Franklin,’ ” Isaacson said in an interview. “I felt I was able to share a feast with the master chef.”
When he got stuck while writing one of his own best-selling historical profiles, Isaacson would turn to a passage from Mr. McCullough’s “John Adams” or “Truman” to “try to get into the rhythms that mark his greatest passages.”

Mr. McCullough’s writing style was deceptively approachable, often belying the years he spent mining dusty archives for that telling letter, document or record that might bring a story to life.
In the course of his research for “Truman” (1992), Mr. McCullough moved for a time to the 33rd president’s hometown of Independence, Mo., to pick up the local accent and almost literally follow in the footsteps of the former president on his fast-paced early-morning walks. Years earlier, while writing “The Great Bridge” (1972), he had grown a beard in an effort to immerse himself in the life of one of the key builders of the Brooklyn Bridge.
“The only way I can attain this feeling for my subject is when I’ve soaked up so much information on it, I know it from every angle and direction, and can call on all those resources to imagine that I am there,” Mr. McCullough told the New York Times.
“People often ask me if I’m working on a book,” he continued. “That’s not how I feel. I feel like I work in a book. It’s like putting myself under a spell. And this spell, if you will, is so real to me that if I have to leave my work for a few days, I have to work myself back into the spell when I come back. It’s almost like hypnosis.”
Working for much of his career in a tiny windowed shed behind his farmhouse in West Tisbury, Mass, on Martha’s Vineyard, Mr. McCullough tapped away on a manual 1940 Royal typewriter purchased for $25 in 1965.
“I like the tactile part of it,” he told the Times. “I like rolling the paper and pushing the lever at the end of the line. I like the bell that rings like an old train. … I even like crumpling up pages that don’t work. … I don’t like the idea that technology might fail me, and I don’t like the idea that the words are not really on anything.”

More at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/08/08/david-mccullough-dead-american-history/

 

[joelbc1]

What a great and well documented historian Mc Cullough was! Great writer..and more recently, a great interview!

 

[LuteHawk]

In my personal library, I have David McCullough"s book
"John Adams" which he personally autographed. It was
at a book fair hosted by Laura Bush on the National Mall
in Washington, DC. I also own his book "1776"

Bottom Line: His writing makes history come alive.

 

[JupiterHawk]

 

[lucas80]

I have several of his books. He truly was a national treasure.

 

[Titus Andronicus]

From the Article:

“History matters. That’s what I’ve tried to convey,” Mr. McCullough told the Patriot Ledger of Quincy, Mass., in 2017. “It’s essential to understand our nation’s story, the good and the bad, the high accomplishments and the skullduggery. And so much of our story has yet to be told.”
................................................................................................

Please allow me to "slightly" highjack your post by posting from the WSJ Editorial Page from a couple of days back. This article speaks of the risk of slouching off into the realm of "Presentism" when teaching history. I do not think Mr. McCullough will ever be under such an accusation. I am not sure he ever worked for any university.

In any case, there is a definite connection between Mr. McCullough's methods of writing and the views of this editorial writer.

........................................................


Academic historians are losing their sense of the past. In his August column for the American Historical Association’s journal, Perspectives on History, James H. Sweet warned that academic history has become so “presentist” that it is losing touch with its subject, the world before yesterday. Mr. Sweet, who is the association’s president and teaches at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, observed that the “allure of political relevance” is drawing students away from pre-1800 history and toward “contemporary social justice issues” such as “race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism.” When historians become activists, he wrote, the past becomes “an evidentiary grab bag to articulate their political positions.”

Mr. Sweet knows his audience, so he did his best to appease the crocodile of political correctness. He denounced Justice Clarence Thomas for a gun-rights decision that “cherry-picks historical data” and criticized Justice Samuel Alito for taking the word “history” in vain 67 times in his Dobbs abortion opinion. But Mr. Sweet also pointed out that Nikole Hannah-Jones’s “1619 Project” isn’t accurate history, and that “bad history,” however good it makes us feel, yields bad politics. “If history is only those stories from the past that confirm current political positions, all manner of political hacks can claim historical expertise.”

History’s armies of nonacademic readers will find this obvious and undeniable. Mr. Sweet’s academic peers, however, tore him to pieces on Twitter, accusing him of sexism, racism, gratuitous maleness and excessive whiteness.

“Gaslight. Gatekeep. Goatee,” said Laura Miller of Brandeis University, detecting patriarchal privilege written on Mr. Sweet’s chin. Benjamin Siegel of Boston University, who thinks his politically correct profession is “leveraged towards racist ideologies,” called the essay “malpractice.” Dan Royles of Florida International University accused Mr. Sweet of “logical incoherence,” which is academic-speak for “idiot.” Kathryn Wilson of Georgia State detected an even more heinous error, “misrepresentation of how contemporary social justice concerns inform theory and methodology.”

Mr. Sweet responded with the bravery that defines the modern academic. He apologized on the AHA’s website for the “harm to colleagues, the discipline, and the Association” that his “ham-fisted attempt at provocation” had caused, especially to his “Black colleagues and friends,” and begged that he be allowed to “redeem” himself.

The AHA, which had done nothing to stem the tide of insults from its members, prevented nonfollowers from commenting on its Twitter feed, because, it said, “trolls” and “bad-faith actors” had joined the debate. One of the bad-faith actors was a racist agitator, Richard Spencer. His contribution, alarmingly, was hardly trolling. Mr. Spencer pointed out that Mr. Sweet was merely repeating the advice of the eminent 19th-century historian Otto von Ranke, who told historians to go into the archives and tell history “as it really happened.” We know a profession is in trouble when it takes the worst kind of amateur to state the obvious.

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child,” Cicero once wrote. “For what is the worth of a human life if it is not woven into the life of our ancestors by the record of history?” Even Ms. Hannah-Jones would agree with that. The AHA’s activist wing, however, disagrees. Like Cicero, who was both a politician and a historian, they see history as a rhetorical resource. Unlike Cicero, they see nothing good in their people’s history and only wickedness in their ancestors.

When the purpose of history changes from knowledge of the past to political power in the present and future, historians become mere propagandists. Academics who succumb to the sugar rush of activism lose their sense of balance. Meanwhile, the AHA’s annual reports show that undergraduates and graduates are voting with their enrollments, with a related decline in job opportunities for holders of new doctorates. In 2016-17 alone, undergraduate enrollment fell by 7.7%. The number of new doctorates fell by about 15% between 2014 and 2019, and the number of job openings has halved since 2008. The latest AHA Jobs Report is a threnody of “program closures, enrollment declines, and faculty layoffs.” Signs of stabilization, it reckons, are a “false floor.” Why study history if all it equips you for is a nasty and crowded climb up the greasy pole of academic preferment? Much easier to pursue activism through the modish triad of sex, race and gender studies.
All of which tends to confirm Mr. Sweet’s observations about the perils of presentism and activism. Yes, history is always written backward, from present to past. And history’s present uses might include politics. But the task of a historian is to understand the strange past and show how it shapes the familiar present. If we succumb to what the English historian E.P. Thompson called “the enormous condescension of posterity,” then we lose the ability to imagine how people lived in any era before our own. We lose difference and complexity. We lose the perspective that history is supposed to impart and with it any sense of progress. Dictators are presentists, too.

Mr. Green is a Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

 

[hawkifann]

I have several of his books. He truly was a national treasure.

I have several as well and agree. I was happy to see his work on the Johnstown flood called out, that was maybe one of his more underrated books.