This is an I-Heart podcast.

And we continue with our American stories.

Up next, a story from one of our great and departed historians.

We try to keep his voice alive because it was so unique. The great David McCullough.

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

this audio with us. This was his speech McCullough gave before he died in the Netherlands

at the Institute on how our founders weren't like ordinary men 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, Cervantes, 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. I think you can't

understand people unless you understand where they came from, where they grew up. The

vernacular, the language, the things that, you know, the sort of rules to live by, taught to them

by their parents. You know the old famous line of Harry Truman's,

if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen? That's a common expression in Western

Missouri. That's not Harry Truman. And you learn so far more about life. That's why I think

it's when students are not interested in history, when history is poorly taught and turns students away,

they are failing to get the chance to better understand how life works.

The role of cause and effect in life, for example.

Well, if they don't know about cause and effect in history, they might not get the idea that happens in your own life.

I'll give you one of my favorite examples. We know that transportation was very slow and difficult in that time, and by our terms that means inconvenience, a nuisance, discomfort, how did they put up with it? It must have been so hard for them. Yes, it was all of that. We think of transportation and communications two different things, two different worlds. To them it was one, because nothing could be communicated faster than somebody on a fast horse.

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