History Matters
by David McCullough
Edited by Dorie McCullough Lawson and Michael Hill (Simon & Schuster)
David McCullough is a historian who writes the sort of histories that I do not read. Yet even given that, this book is fire.
This is a collection of McCullough’s work, specifically essays, lectures, brief articles, and unpublished notes. It is about him, specifically in the form of his interview with The Paris Review, but about his thinking on his historical subjects, and his thinking on his work. Notably, it includes his thinking on his work in a broad sense of the purpose and uses of history, but also on his work in a technical sense of the craft of writing and the work of doing history.
This book is what I needed right now. McCullough, whose sole overt political act was to criticize Trump, can wend towards the Sagan-esque O Tempora, but his non-historian background grants a sort of humility and an emphasis on doing history as work, reminiscent of someone like Mike Royko or Studs Terkel.
McCullough’s theory of history is that it is hard. The lesson of the past is not in the past’s greatness. It is not in being comforted by past greatness. It is in embracing the hard feelings about and around what came before through fearless appraisal. America is great, but that it was not great is the secret of its greatness.
Likewise, the passages about the work of writing history (and writing in general) are focused on the nature process, effort, and the elements thereto. These are frequently pleasurable elements in his avaricious attitude towards books as a cornerstone to learning how to write, but come back to a repeated pressure to do the work that goes into writing; to care about the work that goes into the writing, in a variety of different ways.
About the only part that does not hit is some of the short biographical studies that are included in the book. While the ones like on Truman work in precis for his grander projects, others feel like an attempt to provide a representational section for his writing, and just do not fit here.
It is super. I had to force myself not to read it in a single sitting. It has already changed how I write, like what you are reading right now.
My thanks, and my condolences, to the editors, Dorie McCullough Lawson and Michael Hill, for collecting the material, and to the publisher, Simon & Schuster, for making the ARC available to me.
CITATION HEEDED 