Author Jon Meacham compares David McCullough to former United States President Harry Truman, noting both men shared a fundamental fascination with people. Meacham explains that McCullough approaches history not as a static record, but as a dynamic narrative driven by human emotions, ambitions, and flaws. This empathy makes McCullough’s historical writing a lesson in good citizenship.

Meacham praises the collection as a final testament to McCullough’s enthusiastic approach to the American past. Meacham recalls interviewing McCullough two decades earlier on Martha’s Vineyard. During that visit, the historian worked in a small backyard office, typing his manuscripts on a 1940s manual typewriter. Meacham also highlights McCullough’s broader cultural impact, specifically his iconic narration for historical documentaries. 

Meacham then sketches McCullough’s origins. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1933, McCullough graduated from Yale and began a career in publishing and government. Meacham emphasizes the critical role of McCullough’s wife, Rosalee. Following the success of his first book, The Johnstown Flood (1968), her encouragement gave McCullough the confidence to quit his steady job and pursue writing full-time. The couple relocated to Martha’s Vineyard in 1972, and McCullough eventually won Pulitzer Prizes for his biographies of Truman and John Adams. Meacham concludes that McCullough’s legacy is his enduring ability to make history feel vibrantly alive for modern readers.

David McCullough made these remarks upon receiving the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1995, an honor he accepted alongside a lifetime of recognition including two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Book Awards, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

McCullough argues that history teaches people how to behave and forms the foundation of genuine patriotism—not the boastful kind, but a true love of country. At its core, history offers a lesson in appreciation: All institutions, freedoms, and cultural achievements exist because prior generations did the difficult work of creating them. Indifference to that legacy is a form of rudeness toward those who came before.

Beyond civic duty, history gives people a sense of proportion about their own brief lives. It teaches by example, inspiring courage, tolerance, and even humor, and functions as a navigational aid during turbulent times. McCullough cites Churchill’s wartime reminder that past generations were not soft and Jefferson’s warning that a nation cannot be both ignorant and free. He further argues that the widening gap between the educated and uneducated poses a graver threat to American life than economic inequality.

McCullough frames history as an extension of lived experience, as vital as poetry or music, and insists that withholding it from children cheats them of a full life. He echoes historian Barbara Tuchman’s simple prescription for bringing history alive: Tell stories. He closes with gratitude for the English language and for American life itself.

In 1991, McCullough addressed the National Preservation Conference in San Francisco. His love of architecture, from steel mills to cathedrals, was central to his identity: He served on the board of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

McCullough opens with author Robert Louis Stevenson’s observation that Edinburgh’s jumble of architectural styles makes a living drama, not a stage set—a celebration of old and new coexisting. McCullough compares indifference to the past to the lack of a sense of pitch. The pull toward history is a human instinct against confinement to a single moment; storytelling is a survival tool. What truly attracts us is novelty: Change is the essence of life, and that is what history offers.

McCullough juxtaposes Brunelleschi’s dome in Florence—still revolutionary after five centuries—with the Golden Gate Bridge (1933-37), which enhances its natural setting. Against the claim that construction always weakens landscapes, he cites architectural historian Vincent Scully’s view that great builders have long known how to build in harmony with place. The bridge rose amid Depression-era upheaval, the abdication crisis in Britain, the Charlie Chaplin movie Modern Times, and the Berlin Olympics; it was also the moment when Niels Bohr and colleagues laid groundwork for splitting the atom and when Wernher von Braun began rocket research: the origins of the nuclear and space ages.

As a Pittsburgh-raised English major who grew up among bridges, McCullough rejects the phrase “foreseeable future.” Instead, he hopes that Americans will become less fixated on the present, that history will become more inclusive, and that we will emulate 18th-century Edinburgh’s social cross-pollination among lawyers, doctors, engineers, and poets, which fostered figures like David Hume and projects like the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He urges preservationists to enlist filmmakers and photographers and to engage television when it is done well. He paraphrases 19th-century American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson and 15th-century Florentine historian Francesco Guicciardini to stress that the past continuously speaks to the present and that patterns recur for those who look closely.

McCullough calls for education that rewards imagination and risk-taking—qualities not always linked to high grades—and notes that great civilizations depend on confidence and continuity rooted in historical knowledge. The recent collapse of communist governments in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, he argues, is a seismic event whose full meaning remains to be seen.

He closes with a personal story from the 1964 World’s Fair: His five-year-old son, placed at the wheel in General Motors’ automated vision of the future, ignored the spectacle because he felt responsible for steering. Responsibility, McCullough concludes (with a nod to French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry), is central to morality. He calls himself a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist.

McCullough’s 2018 commencement address at Providence College discussed the role luck, good and bad, plays in history.

McCullough notes the universality of rituals for courting luck and tells the story of physicist Niels Bohr keeping a horseshoe over his door because it was said to work even for nonbelievers. Despite luck’s obvious importance, however, colleges rarely teach it as a subject.

McCullough presents the American army’s retreat from Brooklyn in August 1776 as one of history’s great strokes of fortune. After defeat in the Battle of Brooklyn, George Washington’s men were trapped on Brooklyn Heights, backs to the East River. A persistent northeast wind had kept British warships off the river, preserving an escape route. On August 29, Washington and his generals resolved to retreat. As the evacuation of roughly 9,000 troops, horses, and artillery began that night, the wind shifted to the southwest, favoring the crossing. Near dawn, with soldiers still waiting, a dense fog suddenly cloaked the Brooklyn shore while leaving Manhattan clear. By about seven o’clock in the morning, the last soldier had landed safely; the fog lifted an hour later. Not a single life was lost. Without that sequence of meteorological luck, McCullough suggests, the war might have ended then and there.

He also argues that people can help make their own luck. Wilbur Wright, set back by a facial injury that led to years of depression and seclusion, found purpose in voracious reading, including material on 19th-century German aviator Otto Lilienthal and on bird flight. What began as misfortune became the foundation of his life’s work with his brother, Orville.

McCullough reflects on his own good fortune: A chance find at the Library of Congress led to his first book, The Johnstown Flood (1968), and an overheard lunch to The Great Bridge (1972). His greatest luck, he says, was marrying Rosalee Ingram Barnes, his editor in chief and guiding star. He closes by urging the Class of 2018 to be generous, listen well, and hold fast to truth, loyalty, decency, and courage—and to act, not spectate.

This previously unpublished essay was written in 1990.

McCullough’s central claim is that nothing of lasting importance in American life has ever come without effort. America is itself an act of sustained labor, born of dangerous ocean crossings, land clearing, epidemic disease, slavery, and grueling industrial work. On a flight into Minneapolis, he overheard a child remark on the farms below and a grandmother reply that they required enormous work, a small exchange that captures his point. Americans judge one another by the quality of their work because, at their core, they are a creative, industrious people who draw deep satisfaction from what they build and accomplish, not from what they own or consume.

A second lesson from history, he argues, is that Congress and political leaders act when the public demands it, not before. He traces this pattern from early-20th-century reforms like limits on child labor, women’s suffrage, conservation, to New Deal legislation. If today’s politicians fall short, citizens who fail to vote, pay taxes, or participate in the census bear responsibility. He anchors the point with Lincoln’s view that the country and its institutions ultimately belong to the people.

He identifies America’s distinctive strengths as making things, building, solving problems, and educating its citizens. Creative vitality, he notes, rarely tracks political conditions: The cultural explosions of the 1920s—Gershwin, Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Lindbergh, and physicist Michelson—coincided with the Teapot Dome scandal and the term of a president who napped each afternoon. He lists further American achievements—the Panama Canal, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Mount Wilson Observatory, the Library of Congress, Lincoln Center, jazz, the general hospital, and Voyager II—as evidence of what a productive people can accomplish.

Education, he concludes, has been the nation’s salvation and must remain open to all. America is ultimately defined by what its people do, and its future will be determined by what they choose to value.

An introductory note identifies this as McCullough’s interview with The Paris Review, one he especially valued among his public conversations.

McCullough explains the motto above his desk, “Look at your fish,” as the instruction of 19th-century biologist Louis Agassiz to his students. Agassiz made students spend days observing a specimen to learn that seeing—close, sustained observation—is the essential skill. Insight, McCullough argues, often comes from reexamining what is already there rather than from discovery. For example, while researching young Theodore Roosevelt’s asthma, McCullough plotted the future president’s attacks on a calendar. The result revealed a pattern: Roosevelt’s asthma episodes happened on Sundays, suggesting a psychosomatic trigger. Later, researching the mechanics of taxidermy to get a sense of Roosevelt’s interests, let McCullough show, rather than assert, Roosevelt’s patience and dexterity.

McCullough credits Thornton Wilder’s maxim to write the book one most wants to read. At Time-Life, he absorbed lessons about punchy writing (one editor stamped weak copy “DULL”). He admired narrative historians like Bruce Catton and Margaret Leech. A chance find of Johnstown flood photographs at the Library of Congress led to his first book; practical advice from Harry Sinclair Drago—aim for a steady daily output—helped him write The Johnstown Flood (1968) at night; his children fell asleep to the sound of the typewriter.

Committed to narrative, McCullough cites novelist E. M. Forster’s distinction between mere sequence and true story, where cause, effect, and feeling bind facts. After his first book, McCullough refused to be typecast as a disaster writer. An overheard lunch conversation led him to write about the Brooklyn Bridge, and he and his wife Rosalee later discovered a trove of papers from the Roebling family—the civil and structural engineers who designed the bridge—in an attic at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Though not trained in engineering, McCullough found that technical material could be made compelling. His editor also suggested the Panama Canal, which came next: The Path Between the Seas (1977) took six years and required substantial cutting of French-canal material.

McCullough works in a small outbuilding on a 1941 Royal typewriter, valuing the slow pace that forces rewriting and lets him hear the prose. Rosalee reads chapters aloud, a habit that catches errors eyes miss; a sentence she once flagged but he defended later drew a reviewer’s criticism, proving her right. McCullough continues researching even after publishing. Years after writing The Great Bridge, he concluded—with input from the Boston Psychoanalytic Society—that Washington Roebling likely developed an opiate dependency to manage caisson-disease pain and that his seclusion also reflected a psychosomatic response to a difficult relationship with his father.

Fieldwork matters: McCullough went to Panama to feel the climate and once ran Harry Truman’s route through the Capitol the night FDR died to test its plausibility. He abandoned a planned Picasso biography after deciding he neither respected nor liked the man; a biographer must be willing to live with a subject for years. Training in drawing and painting at Pittsburgh public schools and Yale, including a course with Vincent Scully, taught McCullough to see and compose—skills he applies to writing. Robert Penn Warren’s demanding Daily Themes at Yale—a page of original prose per day—instilled writing discipline.

Growing up in wartime Pittsburgh amid industry, libraries, museums, and streetcars gave McCullough a rich early education, echoing Louis Kahn’s idea that a great city offers the young a sense of possible futures. McCullough’s current project on John and Abigail Adams—originally paired with Jefferson—focuses on the Adamses’ vivid correspondence, written under strain and separation. He is also drawn to Brunelleschi’s dome as a future subject. Asked for a favorite among his books, he answers: always the one he is working on now. The interview was conducted by Elizabeth Gaffney and Ben Howe.