There’s a small, unusual author’s revelation buried in the pages of the last book to bear the name of David McCullough, the historian who single-handedly revived the reputation of two presidents (John Adams, Harry Truman) and who brought to life the destruction of the Johnstown Flood, the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, the young years of Theodore Roosevelt, and so much more. That surprising element is his boyhood address: 549 Glen Arden Dr., Pittsburgh, Pa.
Now, I already knew that McCullough grew up in Pittsburgh, because a bridge over the Allegheny, upriver where his beloved Pirates now play, is named in his honor, and because one morning I looked out my Pittsburgh bedroom window to see the Pulitzer-winning author pointing to the third floor of the house next door, for that is where one of his (and my) favorite authors, Willa Cather, wrote “O Pioneers!”
So when I saw that home address I hopped into my roadster and drove about a mile to have a look at the brick house with a wooden green gate, right near the basketball hoop placed on a small island in the middle of the street. To the right of the door there was an American flag flapping in the breeze. Of course there was.
I mention all of this because even if you don’t live in Pittsburgh, McCullough, who died in 2022, has been inside your house just as he was outside mine — on your bookshelves, very likely, and surely on your television screen, where his voice (the Voice of History, you might say) guided you through hours of the PBS “American Experience” series (which just announced it is struggling in the face of budget cuts).
This last book, with a pun in its title (“History Matters”), is unlike any of those books sitting upright in your living room or study. Those volumes are informative, insightful, entertaining, even. There’s nothing wrong with them and very much right about them, and even the academic types who dislike popular history, and dislike popular historians even more, will say so. This book is different. It consists of 20 pieces, some of them speeches, some essays, some just some thoughts jotted down for himself and, thanks to the editors (his daughter Dorie McCullough Lawson and his longtime assistant Michael Hill), for posterity, too.
But this tidy little volume (under 200 pages) has unusual virtues. The pieces are warm, inviting. The language is conversational. In his previous books, McCullough is delivering a classroom lecture — a good one, and you feel like taking notes, if only in the margins. In this collection, he is at your dinner table, talking over a plate of asparagus and passing the butter.
In these pages, McCullough describes the joy of the chase as he hunts down a subject, and the exhilaration of the process of setting down and showing what he has learned. As always he is authoritative, but in these pages he is a bit of an innocent, too. It makes for charming reading.
He could be prescient. In 1995, writing about the education gap, he foresaw the tensions that led to Donald Trump’s ascendancy:
“And if the gap between the educated and the uneducated in America continues to grow as it has in our time, as fast or as faster than the gap between the rich and the poor,” he writes, that “is going to be of greater consequence and the more serious threat to our way of life. We must not, by any means, misunderstand that.” How many of us who are political analysts wish we had written precisely that as the 2016 election approached?
These selections touch on historical figures as well known as the artist Thomas Eakins (who “saw his paintings as an enduring historical record”) and the author Harriet Beecher Stowe (who stared in wonder at Théodore Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa” feeling, as McCullough tells us, that “no more powerful piece had ever been painted”) and as lost to modern memory as Manasseh Cutler, Yale Class of 1765 and possessed of doctorates of divinity, law, and medicine (the “most energetic and effective lobbyist” for the Northwest Ordinance, McCullough writes).
A 1999 Library of Congress speech on George Washington includes an invaluable meditation on how people in the past lived, operated, and made decisions in a world far different from this one, with perspectives far different from ours. “You cannot assume,” he explains, “that because an onion tasted the same to them or the stars were in the same configuration, that they were just like we are.” Good lesson for these days when history has become weaponized.
Then there was a lecture, full of advice for writers, he delivered at Dartmouth College in 2012:
“Write for the ear as well as the eye, Read what you have written aloud or have someone read it to you, And listen closely. You’ll hear mistakes you don’t see. Put what you’ve written on the shelf for a while and then read it again. Very often you’ll see ways to make it better that had eluded you.”
I was at that lecture, used that advice, and shared it in writing courses I have taught. In fact, I just followed that guidance again, a moment ago before pushing the “Send” button. If you got this far in this review, thank the bookish boy who grew up at 549 Glen Arden Drive and not me, and maybe buy his last book.
David Shribman, for a decade the Globe’s Washington bureau chief, is a nationally syndicated columnist.
History Matters
By David McCullough
Simon & Schuster, 192 pages, $27