"History Mattters" by David McCullough - A Review

 As an historian, David McCullough would be certain to remember that this day is the 82^ndanniversary of D-Day. On that morning, while all hoped for success, no one involved could know the outcome. Fifty thousand highly trained German troops manned defensive positions, overlooking the beaches at Normandy. Approximately 155,000 allied soldiers, including airborne troops, landed in France that day. A little over 4,000 were killed and about 6,000 were wounded.

 

From the perspective of time, we know what a success the operation was, but of course none of the men involved could see the future. What we now know is that we – the West and all those alive then and born since – are the beneficiaries of the courage and skill of those men. We cannot know the fear those soldiers and sailors felt, but we should appreciate the principles for which they sacrificed so much. Our debt of gratitude can never be fully re-paid, but we should never forget what they did on the beaches and fields in northern France that June day, eighty-two years ago.   

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

History Matters, David McCullough

June 6, 2026

 

“The marvelous thing about the past is whenever

you reach down into it, all you find is life.”

                                                                                                                David McCullough

                                                                                                                Address, National Preservation Conference

                                                                                                                San Francisco, 1991

 

David McCullough, a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Price and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, died at 89 in 2022. Even in death we are recipients of his wisdom. His daughter Dorie McCullough Lawson and his researcher Michael Hill gathered a selection of unpublished essays, speeches, tributes and interviews. History Matters is for those with a love for history and an appetite for learning. 

 

The book is short (168 pages) and divided into four parts. David McCullough was a polymath; he has offered us a potpourri, ranging from history and books to writing, art and literature. A few samples:

 

In an address to the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1991, he said: “...but what I really think draws us to history, the pull of the past, is change. It is what is new, not what is old. And change is the essence of life.” In a 1995 talk at the Library of Congress: “The characters in Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War and War and Remembrance are real because they are in our hearts.” And at Dartmouth College in 2012, he told the audience: “Write to make music. Don’t just pound out notes.” In 1985, Mr. McCullough hosted a documentary on the artist Thomas Eakins, for which he wrote an essay: “Eakins...was painting not for the moment, or even for his own generation...He saw his paintings as an enduring historical record.” At the National Book Festival in 2002, he mentioned a number of his favorite books: A Death in the Family by James Agee, My Antonia by Willa Cather, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana, and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. It is a list that most of us would gain from reading, or re-reading.

 

While readers of McCullough are accustomed to his histories of the Panama Canal, the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, the Johnstown Flood and biographies of John Adams, Theodore Roosevelt and Harry Truman, readers of this book are presented with a collection of short essays, including synopses on George Washington, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Paul Horgan.

 

The Pulitzer Prize winning author and historian Jon Meacham wrote the foreword. He cites McCullough’s belief that history is “a story, an unfolding drama in which the men and women of a given moment could not know how everything turned out – whether the waters would recede, or whether the plane would fly, or whether the battle would be won.” It is that sense of almost childish wonder that permeates David McCullough’s published works, and which fills us with joy in this collection.