David McCullough, Stephen Ambrose and David Herbert Donald: Time Travelers

What It Takes®

Academy of Achievement

Film, Politics, Arts, Self-help, Sports, Society & Culture, Success, Literature, Humanitarian, Military, Social Justice, Technology, Podcast, Achievement, Music, Science

4.6 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 19 October 2020

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The best-known biographies of Presidents Lincoln, Adams, Eisenhower, Truman, Nixon were written by the three great historians featured here. They talk about their subjects as if they had gone back in time and arrived back, breathless, with stories to share about the people they met. Each one explains the how he discovered that history would be his life's work. For David Herbert Donald and Stephen Ambrose, the spark came from a college professor. For David McCullough, it was the desire to learn about an episode in American history he could find no book about. It's great listening, as we head into the homestretch of what's predicted to be an historic U.S. presidential election! (c ) American Academy of Achievement 2020

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hi, as we head into the final days of the 2020 presidential campaign, many of us are pretty sure
0:10.0	this is one for the history books, but that will be for the historians to say, 30, 40, or 100 years from now.
0:20.0	On this episode, you may be relieved to know know we are not covering the current election, but we
0:25.8	are hearing from three great American presidential historians, time travelers really, who spent their lives submerged in the past so they could
0:36.7	report back to the rest of us. It's science fiction in reverse. I've never written
0:41.8	science fiction but what works in science fiction is how do people
0:46.0	do things and it's so foreign to us beginning with space travel of any kind or would Jules Verne travel into the interior of the earth or whatever
0:56.0	But that's what grabs you about science fiction. They do things differently
1:00.0	Well the same thing happens in history. How did they do things? How did they measure distance?
1:05.0	How did they start a fire when they didn't have any matches in dry newspaper?
1:10.0	How did they study the stars when they didn't have the kinds of equipment that we have today?
1:16.0	How do you make a canoe?
1:19.0	When all you've got is an axe and some big trees. How do you do that? So you're traveling in your mind all the time.
1:28.0	That's one of our esteemed guests, Stephen Ambrose using examples from his book on Mary Weather Lewis, Thomas Jefferson and the opening of the West.
1:39.0	His fellow time travelers on this episode are David McCullough and David Herbert Donald.
1:45.2	They'll all talk about the presidents who fascinated them most and the art of
1:50.2	bringing them to life. This is what it takes a podcast about passion, vision, and
1:56.7	perseverance from the Academy of Achievement. I'm Alice Winkler.
2:03.0	I'm Alice Winkler.
2:05.0	Had a man, this child is gifted.
2:08.0	And I heard that enough that I started to believe it.
2:10.0	If you have the opportunity, not not a perfect opportunity and you don't
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Academy of Achievement, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Academy of Achievement and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.