c.2025, Simon & Schuster
$27.00
169 pages
By Terri Schlichenmeyer
The Truth Contributor
It all happens so fast.
Seems like 20 minutes after something occurs, another event takes its place; even this morning’s news already has dust on it. It feels like a race you didn’t enter, in a world where things happen in a blink – and yet, as you’ll see in the new book History Matters by David McCullough, edited by Dorie McCullough Lawson and Michael Hill, even the least event means something.
Not long ago, Dorie McCullough Lawson, daughter of the late writer David McCullough, and Michael Hill, who was McCullough’s research assistant for “almost forty years,” began “going through DMcD’s papers” and boxes of decades-old work. Critters had gotten into some of the boxes, but hadn’t ruined anything; instead, it quickly became apparent that the Pulitzer Prize-winning Truman, which marked McCullough Lawson ’s career helping her father, wasn’t the only work to contain McCullough’s curiosity and delight over historical surprises.
“Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude.” McCullough was fond of saying. “It’s a form of ingratitude.”
Indeed, McCullough seemed to view history as a thing to appreciate, as one does a beautiful piece of art. He marveled over the actions of humans, the incredibleness of bridges and the joy of learning. Buildings fascinated him; he wrote often about architecture and, says his daughter, he particularly appreciated builders.
Luck, said McCullough, was a factor in American history, often “on a grand scale.” Work is what has made us, and real people with real human flaws have moved us forward. We can’t compare ourselves to those who’ve gone before us because we live in different times – which may explain why readers can struggle to understand history.
Sometimes, McCullough says, he struggled to understand it himself.
Still, we should never stop being, learning or learning about the past.
“There is no better way to understand who we are and why we are… and where we may be heading,” he says, “than by reading history from the hands of good writers.”
In the past few years, you’ve probably heard someone say that history repeats itself. The late author David McCullough may’ve been intrigued by that – and with that in mind, this reflective collection of his shorter works will please you, too.
Wisdom drips from each page of this book, wisdom compiled from six decades of research and writing that McCullough did, and his feelings for his subjects. He was, according to his editors here and by his own admission, the kind of person who threw himself headfirst into learning as much as he could about that which interested him, and anyone who ever read his work saw that. His delight in his subjects was infectious, and that’s really very appealing for readers who love history.
History Matters doesn’t contain the same kinds of writings that you may have come to expect from McCullough but as a collection of his thoughts and musings, it’s a very nice complement to his larger, longer works. Read this short book. It’s the kind you enjoy, then turn around and enjoy again fast.