Free Republic

David McCullough, who was known to millions as an award-winning, best-selling author and an appealing television host and narrator with a rare gift for recreating the great events and characters of America’s past, died on Sunday at home in Hingham Mass. He was 89. The death was confirmed by his daughter Dorie Lawson. Mr. McCullough won Pulitzer Prizes for two presidential biographies, “Truman” (1992) and “John Adams” (2001). He received National Book Awards for “The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal” (1977) and “Mornings on Horseback” (1981), about the young Theodore Roosevelt and his family. Deep...

We cannot find the smallest part of the personal weight of Washington in the narrative of his exploits.  The largest part of his power was latent.  This is that which we call Character, -- a reserved force which acts directly by presence, and without means.  What others effect by talent or by eloquence, this man accomplishes by some magnetism.  "Half his strength he put not forth."  His victories are by demonstration of superiority, and not by crossing of bayonets.  He conquers, because his arrival alters the face of affairs. R.  W.  Emerson, Character from Essays: Second Series (1844) While...

For his new book, The Wright Brothers, ­Pulitzer Prize winner David ­McCullough pored over newspaper articles, photographs, and more than 1,000 letters to create a gripping account of Wilbur and Orville's quest to fly.

Since Franklin Roosevelt, every modern U.S. president has opened his own presidential library. On Friday, President George Washington, the nation’s first, finally will get his turn, as a state-of-the-art presidential library is christened in his honor. Washington’s beloved Mount Vernon steps into a bold new era with the formal opening of The Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington. Some 800 dignitaries, officials, and VIPs will be on hand to witness the unveiling of a library purpose-built to preserve the original books and papers from Gen. Washington’s personal collection. Noted historian and best-selling author David McCullough...

We keep coming back to cover commercially published historian David McCullough for a reason: Unlike his academic counterparts, he actually has something to say. “Many people today are saying that we should be teaching morals in our schools,” McCullough himself said in a lecture earlier this year at Hillsdale College. “They could find support in the closing line of this section of the Commonwealth Constitution, which speaks of the necessity ‘to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings, sincerity, good humor, and all social...

 David McCullough was born in 1933 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and was educated there and at Yale University. Author of 1776, John Adams, Truman, Brave Companions, The Path Between the Seas, Mornings on Horseback, The Great Bridge and The Johnstown Flood, he has twice received the Pulitzer Prize and twice the National Book Award, as well as the Francis Parkman Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. The following is adapted from a public lecture delivered at Hillsdale College on March 31, 2006, during Mr. McCullough's one-week residency at the College to teach a class on “Leadership and the History...

My annual list of books to recommend as Christmas presents is led by the clearest front-runner in years: "1776" by David McCullough.There was a time when the very mention of 1776 struck a responsive chord in Americans, as the year in which their country's independent existence began. Today, history is so neglected in our schools and colleges that even many graduates of Ivy League institutions would have to have the significance of that year explained to them.David McCullough's "1776" is the book to give to them -- and to others. This book brings vividly to life the people and the...

Fantasy time: If I had lived in the colonies 229 years ago today, would I have stayed here in harm's way, or returned to London to sip tea and nibble crumpets with Fortnum and Mason (or one of their forbears)? The temptation would have been great on the eve of the Revolution. Losers would have been traitors, to pay at the end of a British rope. Would I have had the confidence in a ragtag army of farmers who knew how to use a pitchfork, but not necessarily a gun? Would I have trusted that the sailors and fishermen, artisans...

In a recent appearance at the Heritage Foundation, an author who has written many great histories gave some insight as to why the Ivory Tower produces such, at best, lackluster ones. "Many people say, 'Why bother with history?,' and unfortunately many of them are in education," best-selling writer David McCullough said at the Heritage Foundation last Friday. McCullough has penned best-selling historical biographies of American Presidents John Adams and Harry S. Truman. "Why is it possible that an otherwise intelligent person does not know that the original 13 colonies were on the East Coast or who George Marshall was," McCullough...

This week's "Dumbing Down" Award goes to the NEA. (That's the National Education Association, but the same applies to the National Endowment for the Arts.) Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author David McCullough, past president of the Society of American Historians, told a Senate panel recently, "We are raising a generation of people who are historically illiterate and ignorant of the basic philosophical foundations of our constitutional free society." He noted that only three colleges in the United States require a course on the Constitution in order to graduate: the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the Naval Academy at Annapolis...

Thought police in American schools and rotten history textbooks are as great a threat to American freedoms as al Qaeda terrorists, Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential biographer David McCullough said yesterday. "Something's eating away at the national memory, and a nation or a community or a society can suffer as much from the adverse effects of amnesia as can an individual," Mr. McCullough, who wrote the best-selling biography of the United States' second president, John Adams, told The Washington Times. "I mean, it's really bad."

<p>Thought police in American schools and rotten history textbooks are as great a threat to American freedoms as al Qaeda terrorists, Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential biographer David McCullough said yesterday.</p> <p>"Something's eating away at the national memory, and a nation or a community or a society can suffer as much from the adverse effects of amnesia as can an individual," Mr. McCullough, who wrote the best-selling biography of the United States' second president, John Adams, told The Washington Times. "I mean, it's really bad."</p>