History Matters (2025) is a posthumous collection of nonfiction essays, speeches, and interviews by the acclaimed American historian and biographer David McCullough (1933-2022). Known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies Truman (1992) and John Adams (2001), McCullough was a central figure in popular narrative history, celebrated for making the past accessible to a wide audience. This collection, edited by his daughter, Dorie McCullough Lawson, and his longtime research assistant, Michael Hill, gathers previously published and unpublished writing that explores McCullough’s core philosophies. The pieces advocate for the study of history, profile key American figures like George Washington and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and reflect on the craft of writing. The book examines the study of History as Civic Gratitude and Guidance, viewing the past through the lens of Contingency Over Inevitability, and taking Character as the Measure of Leadership.

McCullough, who also won two National Book Awards and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, is one of America’s most trusted public historians. He is familiar to millions as the narrator of documentaries like Ken Burns’s The Civil War and the PBS series The American Experience. The writings in History Matters reflect the narrative style and human-centered approach that define his work. He argues that history is not a deterministic sequence of events but an unfolding story shaped by chance, individual choice, and moral character. These collected personal anecdotes, tributes to his mentors, and detailed analyses of historical figures underscore his belief that a deep connection to the past is essential for building a confident and resilient future.

This guide refers to the 2025 hardcover edition published by Simon & Schuster.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of illness, antisemitism (specifically Holocaust denial), and racism (specifically, the history of slavery in the US).

Summary

In a preface, Lawson explains that she and Hill spent two years after McCullough’s death sorting through his papers, all preserved in physical form because he never worked on a computer. She acknowledges that the book cannot adequately represent McCullough’s wife, Rosalee Barnes McCullough, whom she calls his “true north” (x) and the person who made his career possible across their nearly 68-year marriage. A foreword by historian Jon Meacham provides biographical context: Born in Pittsburgh in 1933, McCullough attended Yale, worked at Time Inc., and joined the United States Information Agency (USIA) under the journalist Edward R. Murrow. Rosalee’s willingness to support his full-time writing career with five children and little income proved decisive. The family settled on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, where McCullough wrote all his subsequent books in a small backyard office, typing on a 1940s Royal manual typewriter he bought secondhand in 1965.

Part One, “Why History?,” opens with McCullough’s 1995 remarks upon receiving the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He argues that history teaches appreciation: Every US institution, freedom, and cultural achievement exists because predecessors did the hard work. Indifference to history, he contends, is a form of ingratitude. He warns that the widening gap between the educated and the uneducated threatens American democracy more than the gap between rich and poor.

In “American Values,” McCullough connects architecture and historic preservation to broader questions about what societies value, using Brunelleschi’s dome in Florence and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco as examples of structures that express the confidence and continuity of the civilizations that built them. A 2018 commencement address at Providence College examines luck’s role in history through the stories of a providential shift in wind and fog that allowed George Washington’s 9,000 trapped troops to cross the East River undetected in 1776, and of Wilbur Wright’s hockey injury and resulting isolation that led him to intensive reading about flight. 

In a Paris Review interview, McCullough gives an extended account of his working methods. He traces his path from Yale, where playwright Thornton Wilder inspired him, through training at Time-Life, to his chance discovery of Johnstown Flood photographs at the Library of Congress. He explains his commitment to narrative history, his reliance on Rosalee as a reader and editor, and his conviction that a biographer must respect and be willing to live with a subject for years.

Part Two, “Figures in a Landscape,” turns to individual subjects. An essay on the 19th-century painter Thomas Eakins examines an artist who sold only 20 paintings in his lifetime yet is now regarded as possibly the greatest American painter of his era. McCullough highlights Eakins’s deliberate choice of subjects defined by self-discipline rather than fame. The Gross Clinic, Eakins’s monumental painting of the pioneer surgeon Dr. Samuel David Gross, embodies Eakins’s belief that democracy should elevate citizens of genuine achievement.

“Harriet Beecher Stowe in Paris” recounts the Stowe’s 1853 visit to France after the sensation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851). McCullough describes Stowe spending a full hour before Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, a massive canvas depicting victims of an 1816 shipwreck, which she declared the most powerful painting she had ever seen. Stowe lamented that her New England upbringing had starved her of beauty, a severe indictment of American cultural life that struck her only after experiencing France firsthand.

“A Conversation About George” presents McCullough’s case that George Washington was the greatest American. McCullough assembles descriptions from Washington’s contemporaries to argue that Washington was far more complex than popular imagination allows. He recounts Washington’s desperate crossing of the Delaware, his handling of the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, and his voluntary surrender of power after the Revolution. McCullough stresses that Washington only accepted the presidency to free the people he enslaved upon his death.

An essay on Harry S. Truman, a president McCullough spent 10 years studying, positions Truman as the seemingly ordinary man who rose to the extraordinary. McCullough identifies 1947 and 1948 as Truman’s best years, during which Truman produced the first civil rights message to Congress, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, and recognition of Israel. 

Part Three, “Influences,” collects tributes and personal reflections. “The Love of Learning” profiles three 18th-century polymaths connected to Yale: Ezra Stiles, the college’s seventh president, who kept Yale alive through the Revolution; John Trumbull, the patriot-artist whose gift of paintings created the first museum on an American campus; and Manasseh Cutler, a minister, botanist, and congressman who helped draft the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which established governance for five future states and permanently prohibited slavery in them. Tributes honor Vincent Scully, McCullough’s Yale professor of art and architecture, as the teacher who taught him to see; novelist and historian Paul Horgan as an exemplar of empathy and craft; and Herman Wouk, whose character Victor “Pug” Henry in The Winds of War (1971) partly inspired McCullough’s decision to write Truman. “Getting Through to Schlesinger” recounts McCullough’s effort during the 1960 campaign to deliver a political idea to John F. Kennedy through speechwriter Arthur Schlesinger Jr., culminating in Kennedy delivering a speech containing one sentence McCullough wrote.

Part Four, “On Writing,” gathers McCullough’s reflections on craft. In “The Good, Hard Work of Writing Well,” he declares that writing focuses the brain like nothing else and offers practical principles: Begin immediately, write for the ear, follow curiosity, rewrite relentlessly, and read widely. He insists that there is no such thing as the past, only other people’s present. “Reading and Writing” argues that texts including John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) and Shakespeare are essential to understanding American culture because earlier generations quoted them constantly as a shared language. The collection closes with “History and Art,” a 2004 commencement address in which McCullough argues that history and art are inseparable, tracing American history through its painters and closing with a line from the painter and teacher Robert Henri: “You should paint like a man coming over the top of a hill singing” (168). The editors apply the image to McCullough himself.