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Home – Political News – Celebrating David McCullough: A Historian’s Love for America

Celebrating David McCullough: A Historian’s Love for America

Award-winning historian and author David McCullough was a man of his time and a man for all time. He passed away four years ago this month at the age of 89, leaving behind a rich catalogue of writing about the United States and our shared history as Americans. He wrote biographies of John Adams and Harry Truman and other books about American history from colonial times through the 20th century.

He also assembled a slim volume, “The American Spirit,” featuring a number of speeches he gave from 1989 to early 2019. Many were commencement addresses, but he also spoke to a joint session of Congress and at the White House on its 200th anniversary. “These beautiful grounds did not exist” in 1800, McCullough told the group that day. “It was a different setting, it was a different country, and it was a different time.”

McCullough’s superpower shines throughout the book: He is respectful of the past and recognizes that modern Americans have much to thank our ancestors for. “Let us not look down on anyone from the past for not having the benefit of what we know, or allow ourselves to feel superior,” he writes in an essay about Dr. Benjamin Rush, a lesser-known Founding Father. “The more we learn of that founding generation of Americans—and I mean the real flesh-and-blood human beings, not the myths—the larger........

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