“A great historian is gone today,” the biographer Robert Caro said in a statement on Monday, adding, “There is only one solace: His books will endure, helping America understand its past.”ĭavid Gaub McCullough was born in Pittsburgh on July 7, 1933, one of four sons of Ruth (Rankin) and Christian McCullough. He was also the host of the television magazine “Smithsonian World.” McCullough was the host of the public television series “American Experience” from 1988 to 1999 and the narrator of some of its episodes.

If Americans were at a loss to understand their history, he continued, they could count on David McCullough: “His voice - not imperious, yet not exactly soothing, either - comes on, and we become more calm.” “Incredibly, you don’t want him to shut up,” one admirer, the journalist and blogger Gary North, wrote at the time. I want it to be something that moves the reader. “And I’m striving to write a book that might - might - qualify as literature. McCullough said in an interview for “Painting With Words,” a short 2008 documentary about him on HBO. “I think of writing history as an art form,” Mr. Thomas Jefferson, the shopaholic Virginia aristocrat, would confide that John Adams showed a certain “want of taste.” The frugal Adams, for his part, concluded that in Virginia “all geese are swans.” “Adams was not inclined to believe mankind improvable, but was certain it was important that human nature be understood.” “Jefferson was devoted to the ideal of improving mankind but had comparatively little interest in people in particular,” Mr. A prime example was his rendering of the Second Continental Congress in 1776, central to the Adams book, in which he captured not only the frustrating day-to-day wrangling over declaring independence as the British fleet approached, but also the sights and smells of a mucky Philadelphia summer, the quality of local architecture and local beers, and the contrasting personalities of two brilliant allies and future enemies. Critics saluted him as a literary master, adept at imbuing the familiar with narrative drama and bringing momentous events to life through small details and the accounts of individual witnesses.

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