Good evening, every saturday night throughout the summer booktv is putting on several hours of a wellknown author. Kind of our twist on binge watching. Tonights featured author s historian David Mccullough the author of a dozen books including bestselling histories on the american revolution, the invention of manned spaceflight the settlement of the Northwest Territory and the creation of the brooklyn bridge. He is a two time winner both Pulitzer Prize and National Book award and appeared on booktv and cspan over 75 times. Coming up over the next several hours we will show you some of those programs. First up in 1992 he appeared on cspans book not programmed to talk about his biography of president harry truman. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for biography and hope to change the view of the truman presidency. Here is David Mccullough from 1992. David mccullough, and your last chapter called citizen Truman Truman had held to the idea of the mythical roman heroes cincinnatus. Whats that
Returned to the farm. Thats a theme that this country was founded on. If you go up to the rotunda in the capital and you look at the great painting of the tremble of George Washington turning over his powers as commanderinchief and the Continental Army to the congress, the cincinnatus symbols are all do that painting because the Founding Fathers really believe this is what democracy entails. It meant that citizenship met any citizen should be called, could be called upon any time to serve his country or her country and any capacity including the greatest power. In the power belong to the people, therefore, power would be returned by those who held it for a time. Truman liked to say i try never to forget who i was, where he came from, and where would go back to. Thats the cincinnatus Team Obviously but it also shows that he knows who he was. He knew who he was and he was proud of who he was and the return to independence after he left the office of the presidency in 1953 was his way of
I am not a physicist. My background is in philosophy. I wrote biographies, maybe i should start by saying how did i get to write a biography of oppenheimer, why did it occur to me to do that . It began 12 years ago when the newspaper asked me to review a collection of his correspondence and up until that point on a new about oppenheimer only what Everybody Knows about oppenheimer, that he directed the las alamos laboratory, he had security clearance taken away from him, he was director of the institute of princeton, that is all of a new. I didnt know that he wrote poetry. I didnt know that he wrote short stories. That he was an expert in French Literature, that he was, taught himself sanskrit, that he was deeply interested in hinduism, that he taught himself sanskrit in order to read the hindu classics in their original language. Neither did i know about his Political Activities in any detail in the 1930s or his relations with his friends and students and family members. All of which i
I first came to washington, d. C. In 2000 as a Congressional Correspondent for the associated press. After spending several years in colombia South Carolina and albany new york. Now, i am originally from mississippi, the son of two Public School teachers come in and being from mississippi, the one thing my parents made sure that i knew was my history. It was almost a state requirement in mississippi to know where you came from. So, when i left mississippi to go to South Carolina, i had this desire to history and i studied the history of South Carolina. I didnt the same thing when i went to upstate new york. I got involved in learning the africanamerican history of upstate new york which, by the way, is very vibrant. A lot of the underground railroads ended in upstate new york city have a very vibrant Africanamerican Community and history up there. But when i left albany new york to come to washington, d. C. , and i knew i was hitting the mother lode. Washington, d. C. On a new had to h