Best of - David McCullough, Stephen Ambrose and David Herbert Donald: Time Travelers

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Academy of Achievement

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4.6 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 9 August 2022

⏱️ 54 minutes

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Summary

It is the rare writer who can make history so compelling, so alive, that people will flock to read it. David McCullough, who died last Sunday, was one of those writers. He was the author of two Pulitzer Prize-winning books: one about President Harry Truman and one about President John Adams. In honor of Mr. McCullough, we are reposting this episode from 2020 which featured him and two other great presidential historians: Stephen Ambrose and David Herbert Donald. They talk here about their subjects as if they had gone back in time and returned, breathless, to share the stories they'd heard. And each writer explains how he fell under the spell of history and made it his life's work. (c ) American Academy of Achievement 2020-2022

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, this is Alice. It is the rare writer who can make history so compelling, so alive, that people will flock to read it.
0:10.0	David McCullough was one of those writers.
0:12.5	Mr McCullough died on Sunday, August 7th,
0:15.6	at the age of 89.
0:17.0	Just two months, by the way,
0:18.9	after the death of the woman he'd been married to
0:21.6	for 68 years.
0:24.0	McCullough was the author of two Pulitzer Prize winning books,
0:27.9	one about John Adams and one about Harry Truman
0:31.2	that was on the New York Times bestseller list for 43 weeks.
0:36.1	He wrote other important and riveting books too, books about the Brooklyn Bridge, the Panama
0:41.2	Canal, the Wright brothers, the Johnstown flood.
0:45.0	David McCullough was so beloved and so trusted as a chronicler of our nation's past that he
0:51.0	was also often asked to narrate documentaries. Here he is as the voice of
0:55.8	Ken Burns Civil War series.
0:58.8	Between 1861 and 1865, Americans made war on each other and killed each other in great numbers,
1:07.0	if only to become the kind of country that could no longer conceive how that was possible.
1:15.1	What began as a bitter dispute over union and states' rights
1:19.2	ended as a struggle over the meaning of freedom in America.
1:24.0	At Gettysburg in 1863,
1:26.0	Abraham Lincoln said perhaps more than he knew.
1:30.0	The war was about a new birth of freedom.
	...

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