Academic Year 1998-1999
Fall 1998
David McCullough is the author of many best-selling books on American history, including the splendid biography, Truman (1992), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. His research is wide ranging, from The Great Bridge (1972), the story of the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge to Mornings on Horseback (1981), a biography of the young Theodore Roosevelt. In addition to the Pulitzer, McCullough has received the National Book Award (twice), the National Book Foundation's Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Award, the Charles Frankel Prize of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Harry S. Truman Award for Public Service. He presented at the Athenaeum on the topic “History as a Source of Strength.”
Spring 1999
Sir Michael Howard is the former Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University and Robert Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University, from which he retired in 1993. His numerous publications include The Franco-Prussian War (1961), The Continental Commitment (1972), War and the Liberal Conscience (1978), The Causes of Wars (1983), Strategic Deception in the Second World War (1995), and The Lessons of History (1991). Most recently, he coedited The Oxford History of the Twentieth Century (1998). He spoke at the Athenaeum on “The United States and Its Allies in World War II” and “What Kind of European Union?”
James M. McPherson, a renowned historian of the Civil War, is the George Henry Davis Professor of American History at Princeton University. He is the author of Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988), which won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize in history, as well as the Christopher Award and the Best Book Award of the American Military Institute. His many other books include The Abolitionist Legacy (1975), Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (1982), Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (1992), and For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (1997). He gave two talks at the Athenaeum on “Ethnic and Civic Nationalism in the Civil War: Was Blood Thicker Than Water?” and “Prairie Lawyer on Trial: Lincoln as Commander in Chief.”