David McCullough

David McCullough is an author, narrator, historian, and lecturer. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and Francis Parkman Prizes. He has also earned the Los Angeles Times Book Award, New York Public Library's Literary Lion Award, the Saint Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States. He has been awarded more than 40 honorary degrees including from the Eastern Nazarene College in John Adams' hometown of Quincy, Massachusetts.

While working at American Heritage magazine as an editor and writer, McCullough wrote in his spare time. The Johnstown Flood, a chronicle of one of the worst flood disasters in United States history, was published in 1968 to high praise by critics. John Leonard, of The New York Times, said of McCullough, "We have no better social historian”. He decided to become a full-time writer, encouraged by his wife Rosalee.

Other books authored by McCullough include The Path Between the Seas (1977), 1776 (2005), In the Dark Streets Shineth: A 1941 Christmas Eve Story (2010), The Greater Journey (2011), and The Wright Brothers (2015). His most recent book is The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For (2017).

McCullough has also narrated numerous documentaries directed by Ken Burns, including Emmy Award winning The Civil War, Academy Award-nominated Brooklyn Bridge, Liberty, and The Congress.

His two Pulitzer Prize-winning books, Truman, and John Adams, were adapted by HBO into a TV film and a miniseries, respectively.

Featured Authors

Acheson, Dean

Dean Acheson (1893-1971) was an attorney and statesman who served as Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953 under President Harry Truman. A key architect of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Acheson stressed the importance of multilateral organizations in the fight against totalitarianism. Prior to his service in the Truman Administration, Acheson clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, worked at Washington law firm Covington & Burling, and served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for one year under President Franklin Roosevelt.

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Becker, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books. Her history When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge won accolades from the Robert F. Kennedy book award, while her recent biography of female conflict journalists You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War won the 2022 Sperber Book Prize and Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize. She is also the author of America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History for young adults.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brinkley, Douglas

Douglas Brinkley, a distinguished professor of history at Rice University and Contributing Editor of American Heritage, has written more than 20 books, most recently The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (Harper 2009) and The Reagan Diaries (HarperCollins 2007). Brinkley earned his B.A from Ohio State University University in 1982, and his Ph.D. from Georgetown University in 1989.