Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. – H.G. Wells

Historian David McCullough has been a favorite of mine for well over twenty years. Born in 1933, McCullough found a calling in writing popular narrative histories and biographies about America and her leaders. With a combination of meticulous research and brilliant, heartfelt prose, McCullough’s books have topped the non-fiction charts for 30 years. His biography of Harry Truman won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1993.

My favorite book by McCullough is Mornings on Horseback, a portrait of young Theodore Roosevelt and his very unusual family. To read how this sickly boy overcame his physical drawbacks to grow up and become the energetic, robust man who rode up San Juan Hill, took on the gigantic and powerful corporate trusts that had poisoned American life and politics, and run around the world engaging in the most vigorous pursuits imaginable was an astonishing experience.

McCullough has made it his mission in life to try and bridge the gap between so-called “popular” historians and academics. By calling for history to be not only accurate, but also well-written and entertaining, he has stirred up a hornets nest in the academic community. Here are some thoughts from Jeffrey L. Pasley

Of course, McCullough’s biggest applause line was a swipe at us nasty academic historians for being such friggin’ brainiacs and writing books that journalists and popular authors don’t get: “He harped on a familiar theme, the necessity of history being entertaining and pleasurable, and he delivered one line that got particular applause: ‘No harm’s done to history by making it something someone would want to read.’” ( It’s so true, if I had a dollar for every time I said to myself, “Uh oh, self, someone might want to read that paragraph—better cut it.” That’s just the way we academical types are.)

McCullough has run into the same problem that other popularizers of history like Thomas Flemming, Richard Norton Smith, and Stephen Ambrose have experienced; a lack of respect for “telling stories” or using a coherent narrative technique to illuminate history. Academics have, for the most part, rejected narrative history because of it’s subjective chronology. Their point is that too many things are going on at the same time for a narrative to reveal what’s really happening.

It’s a point well taken and frankly, I’ll let McCullough and his detractors hash it out. In the meantime, Powerline’s Scott Johnson has linked to a talk McCullough gave at Hillsdale College entitled “Knowing History and Knowing Who We Are.” Many of the themes found in McCulloughs books are fleshed out in the lecture, including McCullough’s concern regarding the ignorance of young people about their own country’s history”

We are raising a generation of young Americans who are by-and-large historically illiterate. And it’s not their fault. There have been innumerable studies, and there’s no denying it. I’ve experienced it myself again and again. I had a young woman come up to me after a talk one morning at the University of Missouri to tell me that she was glad she came to hear me speak, and I said I was pleased she had shown up. She said, “Yes, I’m very pleased, because until now I never understood that all of the 13 colonies – the original 13 colonies – were on the east coast.” Now you hear that and you think: What in the world have we done? How could this young lady, this wonderful young American, become a student at a fine university and not know that? I taught a seminar at Dartmouth of seniors majoring in history, honor students, 25 of them. The first morning we sat down and I said, “How many of you know who George Marshall was?” Not one. There was a long silence and finally one young man asked, “Did he have, maybe, something to do with the Marshall Plan?” And I said yes, he certainly did, and that’s a good place to begin talking about George Marshall.

This is truly frightening but not surprising. It was Karl Marx who said ” History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.” This attitude permeates the entire academic community from top to bottom. History is taught from middle school on with an emphasis on the wrongdoings and shortcomings of historical figures to the exclusion of just about anything else. Couple that with a serious attempt to actually supress the remarkable story of America’s founding by placing it into a context of “class struggle” or, as some marxist historians have done, a counterrevlution brought about by large economic interests and the idea of “American Exceptionalism” becomes irrelevant.

McCullough and other narrative historians have sought to address this problem by revealing the men and women behind historical events as people caught up in forces they seek to control before those forces overwhelm them:

Nobody lived in the past, if you stop to think about it. Jefferson, Adams, Washington – they didn’t walk around saying, “Isn’t this fascinating, living in the past?” They lived in the present just as we do. The difference was it was their present, not ours. And just as we don’t know how things are going to turn out for us, they didn’t either. It’s very easy to stand on the mountaintop as an historian or biographer and find fault with people for why they did this or didn’t do that, because we’re not involved in it, we’re not inside it, we’re not confronting what we don’t know – as everyone who preceded us always was.

Using narrative, McCullough is able to draw pictures with words – pictures that illustrate certain truths that a mere chronology could never do:

Keep in mind that when we were founded by those people in the late 18th century, none of them had had any prior experience in either revolutions or nation-making. They were, as we would say, winging it. And they were idealistic and they were young. We see their faces in the old paintings done later in their lives or looking at us from the money in our wallets, and we see the awkward teeth and the powdered hair, and we think of them as elder statesmen. But George Washington, when he took command of the continental army at Cambridge in 1775, was 43 years old, and he was the oldest of them. Jefferson was 33 when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. John Adams was 40. Benjamin Rush – one of the most interesting of them all and one of the founders of the antislavery movement in Philadelphia – was 30 years old when he signed the Declaration. They were young people. They were feeling their way, improvising, trying to do what would work. They had no money, no navy, no real army. There wasn’t a bank in the entire country. There wasn’t but one bridge between New York and Boston. It was a little country of 2,500,000 people, 500,000 of whom were held in slavery, a little fringe of settlement along the east coast

It would take an academic historian an entire monograph to get across the ideas that McCullough did in that one paragraph.

McCullough also tries to answer the question “Why learn history?” His answer goes to the heart of my own enjoyment:

History isn’t just something that ought to be taught or ought to be read or ought to be encouraged because it’s going to make us a better citizen. It will make us a better citizen; or because it will make us a more thoughtful and understanding human being, which it will; or because it will cause us to behave better, which it will. It should be taught for pleasure: The pleasure of history, like art or music or literature, consists of an expansion of the experience of being alive, which is what education is largely about.

Learning for the sake of learning. Acquiring knowledge just for the sheer joy of knowing. In some ways, it’s our own fault that this attitude has been lost as we’ve demanded that our academic institutiuons become “more relevant” to what will happen in the real world after our children’s formal education is complete. Unfortunately, this has dampened the enthusiasm of the young because instilling the thirst for knowledge in students is no longer the nurturing activity it once was.

McCullough bemoans this loss and illustrates the point with a fascinating story about a young John Quincy Adams, a man McCullough calls ” the most superbly educated and maybe the most brilliant human being who ever occupied the executive office.” Young John Q. was going to Europe with his father who’d been appointed by the Congress to help negotiate the treaty that would end the revolutionary war:

Little John Adams was taken to Europe by his father when his father sailed out of Massachusetts in the midst of winter, in the midst of war, to serve our country in France. Nobody went to sea in the wintertime, on the North Atlantic, if it could possibly be avoided. And nobody did it trying to cut through the British barricade outside of Boston Harbor because the British ships were sitting out there waiting to capture somebody like John Adams and take him to London and to the Tower, where he would have been hanged as a traitor. But they sent this little ten-year-old boy with his father, risking his life, his mother knowing that she wouldn’t see him for months, maybe years at best. Why? Because she and his father wanted John Quincy to be in association with Franklin and the great political philosophers of France, to learn to speak French, to travel in Europe, to be able to soak it all up. And they risked his life for that – for his education. We have no idea what people were willing to do for education in times past. It’s the one sustaining theme through our whole country – that the next generation will be better educated than we are. John Adams himself is a living example of the transforming miracle of education. His father was able to write his name, we know. His mother was almost certainly illiterate. And because he had a scholarship to Harvard, everything changed for him. He said, “I discovered books and read forever,” and he did. And they wanted this for their son.

It goes without saying that most parents would not go this far today to see that their child had the kind of education that Abigail and John Adams wanted for John Q.

What gives me hope for future generations is my own experience in learning history. In the almost 30 years since I graduated from college, I’ve read by my own calculation nearly 300 biographies and histories of Americans and America. This has had a profound effect on my politics as well as my general worldview. I’ve gone from being a liberal to a conservative. My entire outlook on America’s past has undergone a radical transformation as I’ve read the great biographies and narrative histories that illunimated the people who shaped this country. These books showed them to be not the saints portrayed in my youth or the devils portrayed in my young manhood, but rather imperfect beings who for a variety of complex reasons rose to the occasions history offered and made a difference. In short, the more I read, the more perspective I gained. Being able to put events and people into context, to travel back in time and put yourself in their shoes – that is why history is so fascinating and enjoyable to me.

It’s like jumping into a time machine. And having masters like David McCullough at the controls is what makes it fun.