This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

And we continue with our American stories.

And up next, the late historian, David McC McCullough is here to tell the story of John

Adams. And we want to thank the John Adams Institute in the Netherlands for providing and sharing this

audio with us. This was a speech McCullough gave before he died in the Netherlands at the Institute.

Here's David McCullough with some of his great storytelling about our founding fathers

and why we must know our history.

They weren't just like we are.

We can never assume they were just.

They were nothing like we are in many, many ways.

And I, one of the ways I tried to get inside their lives was to try and read not just what they wrote, but what they read.

So I tried to read all the writers that Abigail and John read, Defoe, Swift, Pope, Servantes, Shakespeare.

And what's so fascinating is to see how often they are not just

picking up ideas or turns of phrases, but whole sentences,

whole thoughts that come word for word out of that English literature. When I say that some people write diplomatic

history and some people write military history, I'm not saying that that's not the way to do

it. Thank goodness they do it. Those are serious works by serious people about serious subjects,

and they're important. they play a great part

in the overall understanding of the past. All I'm saying is that's not what I do. And I also

do feel that you must understand the chemistry of it. You can't possibly understand the Truman

administration, for example, without understanding

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