David McCullough on 1776

A great thing to watch on New Year's Day.

9:45 -- One of the hardest things to convey in teaching history is that nothing ever had to happen the way that it did.  History is not just "this following that following that," but rather events could have gone off in any number of directions.

10:30 -- Nothing ever really happens in the past.  "It was their present, and different from ours. . . . And they didn't know how things were going to turn out."

11:50 -- The more we involve ourselves in that other time, the more we come to conclude that "in many ways, they were superior to us."

22:10 -- Henry Knox and Nathanael Greene learned everything they knew about warfare from reading books.  These were men who personified the Enlightenment spirit.

30:15 -- "If our satisfaction with ourselves, if our abundance and our amplitude of opportunities are so hypnotizing to us that we forget about those people and we take what we have for granted, then what kind of country are we?  We profess we love our country.  What would somebody who professes to love another man or woman, or you mother or father, but knows nothing about them -- what kind of love would that be?  We are a very interesting country, and the shame of it is that so few people know much about it!  Now I don't think we ought to read history and read about the revolutionary war, read about any period that fascinates you or others, because it will necessarily make you more grateful for what you have -- it will -- or that it will make us a better citizen -- it will -- or that it will help us to understand human nature far better than almost anything else one could study -- and it will -- but also as a source of pleasure."

35:50 -- On teaching history in schools today:  "First of all, I feel strongly that we need to revise how we're teaching our teachers.  We ought to do away with schools of education and degrees in education.  We ought to have teachers graduating with a good liberal arts education with a major in a real subject....  It's a terrible thing to turn a young person loose to teach [any subject] not knowing anything about it. . . . You can't love something you don't know anything about, and you know from your own experience that the best teachers, the most effective teachers, the ones who can change your life, are the ones who love what they're teaching."

53:15 -- (When asked a question about a current event)  "Harry Truman used to say that you had to let the dust settle for about 50 years before you could really see things in proportion and balance."