A Master Class From David McCullough, America's Emeritus History Professor

He died Sunday at the age of 89 at his home in Hingham, Massachusetts, but his work will live on forever because the subjects he tackled were as big, bold and remarkable as the country he wrote about and loved, America.

Some of those subjects included the Brooklyn Bridge and the man who built it, John Roebling (The Great Bridge); the creation of the Panama Canal (The Path Between the Seas); the biggest year in American history, which was not 1619 (1776); the American brothers who got to man-powered flight first (The Wright Brothers); a flood (The Johnstown Flood); and three American presidents (Truman, Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt and John Adams, which became an award-winning HBO series).

David McCullough, who was raised in Pittsburgh, studied English literature at Yale and became America's unofficial historian emeritus, also won praise for his voiceover work in an acclaimed documentary (The Civil War by Ken Burns) and a superb film (Seabiscuit).

McCullough was America's greatest historian because he knew that stories mattered. That people mattered. And, most important, that context mattered. That judging historical figures—real-life men and women—outside of their historical context to advance a political or ideological narrative was not just bad history but an exhibition of bad faith. And not just as a historian but as a fellow human being.

And so, on the week that Americans honor the loss of a national treasure, it's fitting that one of his finest speeches be a part of the celebration of a life beautifully lived. Delivered in February 2005 in Arizona at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar, McCullough gave a speech titled "Knowing History and Knowing Who We Are." It was a master class on how to teach history and why it matters.

It seems to me that one of the truths about history that needs to be portrayed is that nothing ever had to happen the way it happened. History could have gone off in any number of different directions in any number of different ways at any point along the way, just as your own life can. You never know. One thing leads to another. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Actions have consequences. These all sound self-evident. But they're not self-evident—particularly to a young person trying to understand life.

McCullough's lesson was just getting started as he continued to talk about how he thought about the past and the dangers of judging people outside of their historical contexts.

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 a 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.

He then talked about the American inheritance and how easy it is for us to take it for granted.

The laws we live by, the freedoms we enjoy, the institutions that we take for granted—as we should never take for granted—are all the work of other people who went before us. And to be indifferent to that isn't just to be ignorant. It's to be rude. And ingratitude is a shabby failing. How can we not want to know about the people who have made it possible for us to live as we live, to have the freedoms we have, to be citizens of this greatest of countries in all time? It's not just a birthright, it is something that others struggled for, strived for, often suffered for, often were defeated for and died for, for us, for the next generation.

McCullough then made an important point about our Founding Fathers being human beings with flaws and failings, just like the rest of us.

Those who wrote the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia that fateful summer of 1776 were not superhuman by any means. Every single one had his flaws, his failings, his weaknesses. Some of them ardently disliked others of them. Every one of them did things in his life he regretted. But the fact that they could rise to the occasion as they did, these imperfect human beings, and do what they did is also, of course, a testimony to their humanity. We are not just known by our failings, by our weaknesses, by our sins. We are known by being capable of rising to the occasion and exhibiting not just a sense of direction, but strength.

In this master class, he then talked about how each generation helped shaped the nation, as our founders intended.

It has been good for us that it wasn't all just handed to us in perfect condition, all ready to run in perpetuity—that it needed to be worked at and improved and made to work better. There's a wonderful incident that took place at the Cambria Iron Company in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in the 19th century, when they were building the first Bessemer steel machinery, adapted from what had been seen of the Bessemer process in Britain. There was a German engineer named John Fritz, and after working for months to get this machinery finished, he came into the plant one morning, and he said, "All right, boys, let's start her up and see why she doesn't work." That's very American. We will find out what's not working right and we will fix it, and then maybe it will work right. That's been our star, that's what we've guided on.

He continued with this notion of America as a nation with a unique cultural attribute that's generally assigned to musicians and actors.

We have a gift for improvisation. We improvise in jazz; we improvise in much of our architectural breakthroughs. Improvisation is one of our traits as a nation, as a people, because it was essential, it was necessary, because we were doing again and again and again what hadn't been done before.

And then it was back to our founders, who McCullough said were themselves great improvisers.

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. 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. What a story. What a noble beginning. And think of this: Almost no nations in the world know when they were born. We know exactly when we began and why we began and who did it.

McCullough challenged the modern American education establishment to do a
better job of teaching American history and worried about the cost of losing our
historical memory.

We have to get across the idea that we have to know who we were if we're to know who we are and where we're headed. This is essential. We have to value what our forebears—and not just in the 18th century but our own parents and grandparents—did for us, or we're not going to take it very seriously and it can slip away. If you don't care about it—if you've inherited some great work of art that is worth a fortune and you don't know that it's worth a fortune, you don't even know that it's a great work of art and you're not interested in it—you're going to lose it.

A big part of the answer to the history deficit in America, McCullough said, rested with parents in America. With all of us.

"The teaching of history, the emphasis on the importance of history, the enjoyment of history, should begin at home. We who are parents or grandparents should be taking our children to historic sights. We should be talking about those books in biography or history that we have particularly enjoyed, or that character or those characters in history that have meant something to us. We should be talking about what it was like when we were growing up in the olden days."

McCullough closed out this master class by letting the attendees know that when we study history we learn that America has survived dark times before. And come through those dark chapters stronger and better than before.

The Revolutionary War was as dark a time as we've ever been through. 1776, the year we so consistently and rightly celebrate every year, was one of the darkest times, if not the darkest time in the history of the country. Many of us here remember the first months of 1942 after Pearl Harbor, when German submarines were sinking our oil tankers right off the coasts of Florida and New Jersey, in sight of the beaches, and there wasn't a thing we could do about it. Our recruits were drilling with wooden rifles, we had no air force, half of our navy had been destroyed at Pearl Harbor, and there was nothing to say or guarantee that the Nazi machine could be defeated—nothing. Who was to know? I like to think of what Churchill said when he crossed the Atlantic after Pearl Harbor and gave a magnificent speech. He said we haven't journeyed this far because we're made of sugar candy. It's as true today as it ever was.

For the millions of us who love loved the man who dedicated his life to telling the story of America to Americans, it's a sad time. But David McCullough lives on through his remarkable body of work. To honor his life, hit a bookstore and buy any or all of his books. There are shelves dedicated to his work.

You might want to begin with 1776, a year McCullough thought was so important
in American history—and world history too—that he dedicated an entire book to
the subject. You'll develop a deeper love of McCullough and your country if you
do.