My daughter gave me David McCullough’s History Matters for Christmas. A fairly short posthumous collection of the late historian’s observations, essays, and speeches, the easy read reminds us why studying and understanding history in all its elements is crucial — a point worth remembering as we embark this year upon America’s 250th anniversary.
By all, I mean history in the full range of its splendor and tribulation. Not a sanitized or dystopian reading, where we search vainly for some non-existent version of the “good old days” or give into an equally wrong reading that things always will be dark and bleak.
We need to look at the past with open eyes and a willingness to learn. As we do, we don’t get to bend history to fit our own ideologies. Nor do historians get to make up their own facts or invent what people said, as McCullough emphasized in a Dartmouth College address. The Holocaust happened. Slavery existed, in my own family, I must acknowledge. A riot occurred at our Capitol on January 6, 2021. And yet America survived a civil war. Democratic nations and institutions emerged after two world wars. And scientists developed the means to cure diseases that once decimated societies, along with harnessing technologies to put men on the moon.
McCullough reminds us that history matters largely because the past is about stories. The journeys of people living in their times, grappling with their limits and aspirations. The historian’s task, McCullough repeatedly explained in his writings and speeches, is to give freedom to those people in their times.
That sounds odd but it makes sense when you consider what he once told The Paris Review:
“The problem with so much of history as it’s taught and written is that it’s so often presented as if it were all on a track – this followed that. In truth, nothing ever had to happen the way it happened. Nothing was preordained. There was always a degree of tension, of risk, and the question of what was going to happen next.”
He also observed — rightly — that we want to read stories from the past so that we do not feel alone in our times. We can learn from the moral choices others made — or didn’t make — and how those decisions impacted families, communities, nations and even our world. Who knows where we’d be as a country if Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr had not made his moral choices? Or as a world if leaders like Winston Churchill didn’t courageously rally their nations to combat tyranny’s advance?
Looking at periods like the Civil Rights Era or the advance of freedom after World War II is part of studying what the two-time National Book Award winner termed “the continuity of civilization.” He acknowledged that he preferred studying how one generation passes along to the next, even within a family, the means to “continue civilization.”
McCullough, who won Pulitzer Prizes for his books on John Adams and Harry Truman, contended that people in his profession should show empathy for those in the midst of their circumstances. In a 1985 address honoring the work of the historian and novelist Paul Horgan, McCullough praised his friend and mentor for his ability to “take us into other times, into the hearts of other men and women…”
You can’t help reading someone else’s story without wondering about our stories today. As a nation, we are experiencing a distemper, caught up with extreme passions. What leaders will come along to spur us as individuals and a nation to act with compassion towards those left behind? To practice civility in our engagement with others? To show respect for the institutions that stabilize our communities, nation, and world?
McCullough, upon whom President George W. Bush bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom, contended that giving history the cold shoulder not only is ignorant, but rude and ungrateful. We owe it to ourselves and our nation to understand why history matters. The past belongs to all of us, and we can learn from it.
But more than the civic benefits of learning from history, an appreciation of the past expands our sense of being alive. Or so McCullough thought as he once told the National Book Foundation: “[W]hat it really comes down to is that history is an extension of life. It both enlarges and intensifies the experience of being alive. It’s like poetry and art. Or music. And it’s ours, to enjoy.”
Indeed, let history expand our sense of being alive as we experience the 250th anniversary of our birth as a nation.
