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The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For
The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For
The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For
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The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For

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A New York Times Bestseller

A timely collection of speeches by David McCullough, the most honored historian in the United States—winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Book Awards, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among many others—that reminds us of fundamental American principles.

“Insightful and inspirational, The American Spirit summons a vexed and divided nation to remember—and cherish—our unifying ideas and ideals” (Richmond Times-Dispatch). Over the course of his distinguished career, McCullough has spoken before Congress, the White House, colleges and universities, historical societies, and other esteemed institutions. Now, at a time of self-reflection in America following the bitter 2016 election campaign that has left the country divided, McCullough has collected some of his most important speeches in a brief volume that celebrates the important principles and characteristics that are particularly American.

The American Spirit is as inspirational as it is brilliant, as simple as it is sophisticated” (Buffalo News). McCullough reminds us of the core American values that define us, regardless of which region we live in, which political party we identify with, or our ethnic background. This is a book about America for all Americans that reminds us who we are and helps to guide us as we find our way forward.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateApr 18, 2017
ISBN9781501174209
Author

David McCullough

David McCullough (1933–2022) twice received the Pulitzer Prize, for Truman and John Adams, and twice received the National Book Award, for The Path Between the Seas and Mornings on Horseback. His other acclaimed books include The Johnstown Flood, The Great Bridge, Brave Companions, 1776, The Greater Journey, The American Spirit, The Wright Brothers, and The Pioneers. He was the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award. Visit DavidMcCullough.com.

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Rating: 4.168604865116279 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This was a Christmas gift from my youngest. He knows me well. McCullough, in my opinion, is an excellent historian. This volume is a collection of speeches he gave at various locations (mostly at college graduations) over the past several years.If you are familiar with McCullough's works, you will not be surprised that he often brings up topics and subjects that he has written about: The American Revolution, John Adams, Harry Truman. But he adds insight in these speeches, not just a re-hashing of the past (which we all certainly need to learn from). I especially liked this: "Read. Read, read! Read the classics of American literature that you've never opened. Read your country's history. How can we profess to love our country and take no interest in its history? Read into the history of Greece and Rome. Read about the great turning points in the history of science and medicine and ideas.Read for pleasure, to be sure. I adore a good thriller or a first-rate murder mystery. But take seriously-- read closely-- books that have stood the test of time. Study a masterpiece, take it apart, study its architecture, its vocabulary, its intent. Underline, make notes in the margins, and after a few years, go back and read it again.Make use of the public libraries. Start your own personal library and see it grow. Talk about the books you're reading. Ask others what they're reading. You'll learn a lot". (pp. 147-148)
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I was disappointed by this book because I was hoping for more analysis and insight. However my disappointment is really my own fault because I didn't pay enough attention to its description. This book is a collection of the author's speeches presented at graduations, citizenship ceremonies, event celebrations, etc. These speeches, by their nature, are short and shallow. They also devote a lot of time to flattering the audience and praising local historical figures.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A collection of speeches given at university graduations, historical societies and before Congress, Mr. McCullough reminds us of our history and core values. Excellent series of short pieces. He never disappoints.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This Pulitzer Prize historian has compiled a number of speeches that he had made at college graduations and anniversary ceremonies for the White House, Congress, and the Library of Congress. The history for each speech regarding the founder of the college or the institution itself is well researched and revealed in an enjoyable manner. McCullough will make you proud of American again.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    McCullough has such a talent for writing. It's a wonderful ability to make even the complex understandable and relatable. You know that he absolutely loves what he does. This volume is a collection of mostly commencement speeches he's delivered over the years.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I really love David McCullough. This book is a series of speeches he had given over the years at college graduations, historic places, and to political leaders. McCullough's love of history and every part of our American culture from the past is a true inspiration. After every speech, I wanted to go track down new books on the topics he addressed. I want to read great literature, I want to travel, I want to improve myself as a learner and as an educator. I will be returning to this short volume many times in the future.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Excellent, equal to all his other books. Inspirational
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    McCullough's The American Spirit is a series of speeches, 15 in all given over a period of 25 years. He opens his introduction with these words, "History...is a larger way of looking at life. It is a source of strength, of inspiration. It is about who we are & what we stand for & is essential to our understanding of what our own role should be in our time. History...is human. It is about people, & they speak to us across the years." The 15 speeches he gives are short & concise but each time, they reflect his views stated in his introduction. His mastery of storytelling shines through every speech. I hope the reader will enjoy these speeches as much as I did & learn something new.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    “THE AMERICAN SPIRIT – WHO WE ARE AND WHAT WE STAND FOR” a collection of fifteen speeches by David McCullough at various fora – a Joint Session of Congress, the Capitol, White House, Kennedy Memorial 50th Anniversary and various Colleges and Universities – spanning twenty seven years from 1989 to 2016 is an excellent read. At every occasion David McCullogh takes us through the history of the College or Institution – Ohio University’s Cutler Hall, Lafayette College, the White House, the Capitol,etc.

    Usually McCullough was the chief speaker on the occasion of commencement in various colleges. At a time of self-reflection in America following the bitter 2016 election campaign that has left the country divided, McCullough has collected some of his most important speeches in a brief volume that celebrates the important principles and characteristics that are particularly American. The amount of information he has packed into his addresses is awesome and prodigious. The speeches are inspiring to the graduates passing out stressing the need for dedication and patriotism in service to the nation and people, especially in the USA.

    “THE AMERICAN SPIRIT is as inspirational as it is brilliant, as simple as it is sophisticated” (Buffalo News). McCullough reminds us of the core American values that define us, regardless of which region we live in, which political party we identify with, or our ethnic background.

    ”Can it be that it was all so simple then
    Or has time rewritten every line
    And if we had the chance to do it all again
    Tell me
    Would we?
    Could we?”

    -- The Way We Were, Barbara Streisand, Songwriters: Alan Bergman / Marilyn Bergman / Marvin Hamlisch

    That is the spirit, theme and message of this wonderful collection of speeches by David McCullough.

    The book is of course FANTASTIC.

    A must read for all people living in USA and to the others elsewhere as a beacon of dedication and true patriotism to their motherland.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    David McCullough’s The American Spirit is filled with the author’s thinking about life in America. This book covered a wide range of topics. His speeches reflected on Congress, life-long learning, historical buildings, and some of America’s most famous presidents.McCullough’s talks were before Congress, at a naturalization ceremony in Charlottesville, Virginia, colleges and universities – two of which were in Massachusetts, and at the dedication of historical houses, especially one where Abagail Adams wrote president John Adams. Readers also got glimpses of the White House in Washington DC that was under construction, before John Adams moved in.The author stressed in his speeches the importance of learning. He told his audiences to read, read, read. And indicated how it was essential to have a well-rounded education by studying the arts, science, sociology, psychology, ethics, and history. McCullough talked about how people have to know from whence they came, and where they are going. That’s why he zeroed in on the importance of having them read history.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    As a collection of speeches, the book does not dive deep into any particular event or person from history. McCollough skates along over many events and pulls from history to make a point fitting the occasion for his speech. This leaves the overall experience a little shallow, but I still found perspectives and quotes that were thought provoking and interesting.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Nice collection of speeches given by Pulitzer Price winner, David McCullough. Illustrated with interesting colored photos.

Book preview

The American Spirit - David McCullough

Introduction

History, I like to think, is a larger way of looking at life. It is a source of strength, of inspiration. It is about who we are and what we stand for and is essential to our understanding of what our own role should be in our time. History, as can’t be said too often, is human. It is about people, and they speak to us across the years.

Our history, our American story, is our definition as a people and a nation. It is a story like no other, our greatest natural resource, one might say, and it has been my purpose in my work to bring that story and its protagonists into clearer, more human focus in what I have written and in speeches I have made.

The speeches included here have been selected from a great many given over the past twenty-five years with the hope that what I have had to say will help remind us, in this time of uncertainty and contention, of just who we are and what we stand for, of the high aspirations that inspired our founders, of our enduring values, and the importance of history as an aid to navigation in such troubled, uncertain times.

Two of the speeches were delivered at celebrations of national anniversaries—the Bicentennial of the United States Congress and the Bicentennial of the White House. Two others were given on historic ground and at ceremonies honoring two eminently memorable American experiences, one of high hopes, the other of tragic loss and words of everlasting value.

The first was a summer naturalization ceremony at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. The second, a memorial service marking the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, took place at midday, November 22, 2013, at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. More than five thousand people had gathered, many having traveled far to be there. The day was miserable—cold, wet, and windy—and the crowd had been gathered since early morning. The Naval Academy Glee Club sang The Battle Hymn of the Republic. The scene from the speaker’s platform was one I will never forget.

University and college campuses have been the setting for a number of the other speeches included, and at those occasions I hoped to make clear to the young men and women about to step in to full participation in American life the vital importance of knowing their country’s history, but also that history, like music, like poetry, like art, is a wonderful way to enlarge the experience of being alive—and that history is not about politics and war only, not by any means, and for the reason that music and poetry and art are very much a part of history, a point of particular emphasis in the talk I gave at Lafayette College in 2007.

I have no idea how many speeches I’ve given, starting at least fifty years ago, but I do know I have spoken in all fifty states and I am still at it, primarily because I feel I have something to say and because I always enjoy seeing our country and meeting people and listening to what they have to say.

Yes, we have much to be seriously concerned about, much that needs to be corrected, improved, or dispensed with. But the vitality and creative energy, the fundamental decency, the tolerance and insistence on truth, and the good-heartedness of the American people are there still plainly.

Many a time I have gone off on a speaking date feeling a bit down about the state of things and returned with my outlook greatly restored, having seen, again and again, long-standing American values still firmly in place, good people involved in joint efforts to accomplish changes for the better, the American spirit still at work.

Simon Willard’s Clock

JOINT SESSION OF CONGRESS

Washington, D.C.

1989

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, Senator Dole, Members of the 101st Congress, ladies and gentlemen. For a private citizen to be asked to speak before Congress is a rare and very high honor and I thank you.

Simon Willard was never a Member of Congress in the usual sense. Simon Willard of Roxbury, Massachusetts, was a clockmaker early in the nineteenth century and he did it all by hand and by eye.

In cutting his wheel teeth, reads an old account, "he did not mark out the spaces on the blank [brass] wheel and cut the teeth to measure, but he cut, rounded up and finished the teeth as he went along, using his eye only in spacing, and always came out even. . . .

David McCullough addressing Congress

It is doubtful, the old account continues, if such a feat in mechanics was ever done before, and certainly never since.

The exact date is uncertain, but about 1837, when he was in his eighties, Simon Willard made a most important clock. I will come back to that.

On a June afternoon in 1775, before there was a Congress of the United States, a small boy stood with his mother on a distant knoll, watching the battle of Bunker Hill. The boy was John Quincy Adams, diplomat, senator, secretary of state, and president, who in his lifetime had seen more, contributed more to the history of his time than almost anyone and who, as no former president ever had, returned here to the Hill to take a seat in the House of Representatives, in the 22nd Congress, and thrilled at the prospect. And it was here that this extraordinary American had perhaps his finest hours.

Adams took his seat in the old House—in what is now Statuary Hall—in 1831. Small, fragile, fearing no one, he spoke his mind and his conscience. He championed mechanical improvements and scientific inquiry. To no one else in Congress are we so indebted for the establishment of the Smithsonian Institution. With Congressman Abraham Lincoln of Illinois and Thomas Corwin of Ohio, he cried out against the Mexican War, and for eight long years, almost alone, he battled the infamous Gag Rule imposed by southerners to prevent any discussion of petitions against slavery. Adams hated slavery, but was fighting, he said, more for the unlimited right of all citizens to have their petitions heard, whatever their cause. It was a gallant fight and he won. The Gag Rule was permanently removed.

The House of Representatives by Samuel F. B. Morse

Earlier this year, at the time of the inaugural ceremonies of George Herbert Walker Bush, I heard a television commentator broadcasting from Statuary Hall complain of the resonance and echoes in the room. What resonance! What echoes!

John Quincy Adams is a reminder that giants come in all shapes and sizes and that, at times, they have walked these halls, their voices have been heard, their spirit felt here. Listen, please, to this from his diary, from March 29, 1841:

The world, the flesh, and all the devils in hell are arrayed against any man who now in this North American Union shall dare to join the standard of Almighty God to put down the African slave trade, and what can I, upon the verge of my seventy-fourth birthday, with a shaking hand, a darkening eye, a drowsy brain, and with all my faculties dropping from me one by one, as the teeth are dropping from my head—what can I do for the cause of God and man. . . .

And how he loved the House of Representatives:

The forms and proceedings of the House [he writes], this call of the State for petitions, the colossal emblem of the Union over the Speaker’s chair, this historic Muse at the clock, the echoing pillars of the hall, the tripping Mercuries who bear the resolutions and amendments between the members and the chair, the calls of ayes and noes, with the different intonations of the answers, from different voices, the gobbling manner of the clerk in reading over the names, the tone of the Speaker in announcing the vote, and the varied shades of pleasure and pain in the countenances of the members on hearing it, would form a fine subject for a descriptive poem.

Some nights he returned to his lodgings so exhausted he could barely crawl up the stairs. In the winter of 1848, at age eighty, after seventeen years in Congress, Adams collapsed at his desk. A brass plate in the floor of Statuary Hall marks the place.

He was carried to the speaker’s office and there, two days later, he died. At the end Henry Clay in tears was holding his hand. Congressman Lincoln helped with the funeral arrangements. Daniel Webster wrote the inscription for the casket.

Many splendid books have been written about Congress: Harry McPherson’s A Political Education, Allen Drury’s A Senate Journal, Alvin Josephy’s On the Hill and Kings of the Hill, by Representative Richard Cheney and Lynne V. Cheney, Rayburn, a fine recent biography by D. B. Hardeman and Donald Bacon, and The Great Triumvirate, about Clay, Webster, and Calhoun, by Merrill Peterson. Now, in the bicentennial year, comes volume one of Senator Robert Byrd’s monumental history of the Senate.

But a book that does justice to the story of Adams’s years in the House, one of the vivid chapters in our political history, is still waiting to be written as are so many others.

Our knowledge, our appreciation, of the history of Congress and those who have made history here are curiously, regrettably deficient. The plain truth is historians and biographers have largely neglected the subject. Two hundred years after the creation of Congress, we have only begun to tell the story of Congress—which, of course, means the opportunity for those who write and who teach could not be greater.

There are no substantial, up-to-date biographies of Justin Morrill of Vermont, author of the Land Grant College Act; or Jimmy Byrnes, considered the most skillful politician of his day; or Joe Robinson, the most tenacious Democratic majority leader, whose sudden death in an apartment not far from here meant defeat for Franklin Roosevelt’s court-packing scheme; or Carl Hayden of Arizona, who served longer in the Senate than anybody, forty-one years.

We have John Garraty’s life of Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., but none of Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. Search the library shelves for a good biography of Alben Barkley or Speaker Joe Martin and you won’t find one. They don’t exist. The only biography of Senator Arthur Vandenberg ends in 1945, when his career was just taking off.

The twentieth-century senator who has been written about most is

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