There Isn’t Any Such Thing As the Past (February/March 1999 | Volume: 50, Issue: 1)

There Isn’t Any Such Thing As the Past

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Authors: Roger Mudd

Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)

Historic Theme:

Subject:

February/March 1999 | Volume 50, Issue 1

“I think people are the most interesting subject of all, and I am thoroughly interested in those people who went before us,” David McCullough happily asserts.

Although he is one of the most distinguished historians working today, he received no formal training in the discipline; he considers himself primarily a writer and a storyteller, and that storytelling has won him numerous awards, among them a Pulitzer Prize for his most recent book, the universally acclaimed Truman, two Parkman Prizes, awarded by the Society of American Historians, and National Book Awards for The Path Between the Seas, his epic chronicle of the creation of the Panama Canal, and Mornings on Horseback, his biography of the young Theodore Roosevelt—all of which were bestsellers. His far-ranging interests have also led him to publish books about the Johnstown flood and the Brooklyn Bridge and essays on historic figures past and present.

He is now at work on a volume about the intertwining lives of John and Abigail Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Millions of television viewers know him as the host of "The American Experience" and as the narrator of numerous PBS documentaries, including The Civil War.

McCullough is one of five historians who discuss crucial moments in America’s past on a new television program, American Heritage Presents Great Minds of History, currently airing on the History Channel (the other four are Stephen E. Ambrose, James M. McPherson, Richard White, and Gordon S. Wood). This interview is taken from an hour of that program in which McCullough talks about America’s industrial age as well as about his approach to history. The interviewer is the veteran television journalist Roger Mudd, who has been national-affairs correspondent for CBS, co-anchor of NBC’s Nightly News , and an essayist and correspondent for The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and is now the host of the History Channel. The five interviews will be published in book form by John Wiley and Sons in March.

“The bridge was the beginning of heroic New York.… there was every reason to believe they weren’t going to succeed.

Reading what you have written, I’m struck by your exuberance. You have so much optimism that I wonder whether that might have affected your choice of subjects.

I don’t think that one can see the light in life without the shadow. And there’s great shadow in the story of the past. I hope I have been not just aware of all that but that I have recorded it. I am, however, particularly drawn to those stories, those events, those lives, wherein the human spirit is victorious in the end.

Of course, I draw great pleasure from history. It’s all well and good to say that we should know history because it makes us better citizens, and it does. And that there are great lessons in history, and