McCullough brunches with history class

Brian Farkas News Editor

Hayley Tsukayama News Editor

Not many Vassar students are awake at 10:30 a.m. on Sundays. But history students were eager to make the trek over to the Alumnae House on Sunday, April 6 for a conversation with best-selling historian David McCullough.

McCullough spent the weekend on campus, delivering the lecture entitled “Why History Matters” in the Chapel to a packed crowd of students, alumnae/i, faculty, staff and community members on Saturday evening, April 5.

He spent the following morning and afternoon with Professor of History James Merrell’s Revolutionary America class. In preparation for their discussion with McCullough, the students read his Pulitzer-prize winning book, 1776, about the first year of the Revolutionary War.

The group discussed different approaches to studying history and its place in larger society with Merrell and McCullough.

McCullough, who majored in English literature, is known for his sweeping prose and narrative voice.
“If you had told me when I was your age that I’d be writing biographies and history books, I would have said you were crazy,” he said. “But that’s what’s so special about being young—you can never predict where you’ll be when you’re old.”

Reiterating his point from the night before, McCullough talked at length on the importance of taking history courses.

After the class, McCullough, his wife Rosalie McCullough ’51, Massachusetts Historical Society Librarian Peter Drummey joined the students for brunch.

Over the course of his visit at the College, students from Merrell’s class and members of The Miscellany News and asked McCullough a series of questions about his style, research and career. The following are highlights from these discussions:

You have strong views on history and education. Why do you think history is so important?

“I do have very strong views. You know, our young people today go through high school, they can even go through college and still not come out with a basic understanding of our collective past. And they call that a degree? Does a degree really mean anything at all if it doesn’t guarantee some sort understanding of our culture? Of our past? I just did a workshop with teachers of American history in high schools, and I just couldn’t emphasize enough how important their jobs are.

And I mentioned this in my lecture. We need to not only pay our teachers more—we need to fundamentally change the way we think about them. They are out most important civil servants, not our least important. In a world that’s becoming increasingly complicated, no citizen, and certainly no leader, should be allowed to lack a historical education.”

Your style is novelistic and easy to read. But history students are taught to be constantly wary of sources. In your books, don’t readers sort of have to accept the narrator’s voice as “the truth”?

“Of course you have to accept my books as ‘the truth’! No, I think that readers and especially students of history need to be skeptical about anything, especially information about the past. But I think that the reason my books have proved so popular is that they are written with suspense. Suspense makes sense, because we must remember that those involved did not know how things would turn out. The workers of the Brooklyn Bridge had no idea whether or it would be completed, and John Adams could really never have been sure that the young, fledging nation he helped to create would survive.

Academic historians are useful, and I borrow from them a lot. I just don’t say, “As so-and-so proved in his paper presented at such-and-such a conference.” That’s just not me.”

I understand that your career began as a painter. Do you think that the visual training has influenced how you think and write about history?

“Absolutely. Yes, I did paint a great deal when I was younger, and I still paint my own Christmas cards. Visual thinking is so important, and it really serves to bolster my appreciation and understanding of history.

History, after all, was visual. So many societies—the Egyptians, for example—we only know about them from their art. My book about the Brooklyn Bridge [The Great Bridge] was based very heavily on pictures of the plans and how those plans changed over time.

And moreover, writing a biography is really similar to painting a portrait. You have to build up a character, you have to know them. It might sound odd, but I feel as if I know some of the figured I write about more than I know people that I’ve met.”

You mentioned your next project briefly during your talk. What time period will it cover?

“My next book is an exciting one—it’s going to be all about Americans in Paris from the 1830s to 1930s. The book is still untitled—I always write the titles last—but it’s going to tell the story of really amazing people who made the long voyage across the Atlantic during the mid-19th century. People like James Fenimore Cooper, Edith Wharton, Emma Willard, Samuel Morse, and Mary Cassatt, to name a just a few, all went into 19th-century Paris, which was really a hub of intellectual movements.

All of these people came back with fairly revolutionary ideas that changed so many aspects of American education and government. These people were transformed by their time in France, and this country was largely shaped as a result.”