Ambrose - To America: personal reflections of an historian

In 1953, when I was an eighteen-year-old sophomore at the University of Wisconsin, I took a course in American history entitled Representative Americans. Professor William B. Hesseltine taught it. From his first lecture, I was enthralled. He spoke about presidents, generals, senators, novelists, businessmen. Who they were, what they did, what effect it had.

It was storytelling at its best, about real people whose actions had a direct impact on my life, even if they had lived a century or more ago. Some made mistakes. Some were eniuses. Some were kind, others cruel. They were far more interesting than any character in a novel or actor in a movie.

At the end of his first lecture, on George Washington, I approached the professorshort, bald, pudgy, with a big curved pipeand told him, as he lit up, that I wanted to do what he did for a living. How do I do that? He laughed, then said, stick around and I will show you. That afternoon I went to the registrars office and switched my major from premed to history.

A half-century later, Ive never wavered. History is everything that has ever happened. No one can ever master everything, but your interest will never flag. When I first began teaching American history, my students would come to me before the first day of class and say, Doc, I hate history. Im only here because it is required.

My reply was, You dont mean that. You dont hate history, you hate the way it was taught to you in high school. But history is about people, and there is nothing more fascinating to people than other people, living in a different time, in different circumstances.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, our students know that they live in the richest and freest nation that ever was and they want to know how that happened. They realize that God did not decide to make the United States so supremely special. They want to know who those people were who made it so, what they did, with what consequences. One week in early 2002, I noted that four of the top six books on the New York Times Book Review nonfiction best-seller list were about American history.

I was taught by professors who had done their schooling in the 1930s. Most of them, like many intellectuals of their time, were scornful of, even hated, big business. They presented Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, and other fabulously successful businessmen and investors as devoid of any social consciousness, men whose goal was to plunder; they brought on the Great Depression.

My professors had praise for the anti-Federalists of the Revolutionary era, for Jacksonian Democrats later on. Of course they were four-square for Lincoln in the Civil War, but not for his Republican Party, especially under Ulysses Grant. In the period from the end of Reconstruction down to the 1930s, the only parties they praised were the Populists, the Progressives, and Woodrow Wilsons Democrats. After 1932, it was Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal Democrats, although many of the professors were Socialists who preferred Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas to Wilson and Roosevelt.

These professors were not left-wing zealots, but they couldnt see much good in the Republican Party. Still, they adhered to the first rule for historiansalways stick to the truth. Tell or write only what you can prove. This they did. I was an undergraduate less than a decade after World War II. These men of the Second World War were patriotic, many of them veterans, who wished that the United States had done this or that differently, but who loved their country nevertheless.

At twenty-four with a Ph. D. in hand, I became a teacher of history. My subject was the Civil War. I was a military historian, studying and writing about the generals. Then in 1964, I went to work on Dwight Eisenhowers biography. For the next decade I was writing about him. That was my scholarly life. My country was at war in Vietnam, which I thought a dreadful mistake. I was a dove, not very active in the antiwar movement but very much an outspoken critic.

I spent about half of my time with World War II veterans and historians, who were mainly hawks, and the other half with students, who were doves. The first group was generally positive about the whole of American history, the second group critical. I agreed with the first on some matters, with the second on others.

In this short volume, I tell stories about Americans from the past, what they did, how they did it, with what results. I am a storyteller by training and inclination. I tell war stories, political stories, academic stories, business stories. I tell stories about some of my admired AmericansGeorge Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, Crazy Horse, Custer, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Jackie Robinson, Betty Friedan. And some stories about Americans who are far from being my favoritesAndrew Johnson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon.

Whether Im writing a story, or telling it to family or friends gathered around a campfire, or giving a lecture to students, I hope that my listener is concentrating on what is happening and wants to know how it turns out.

One of the wonderful things about a story is that it can be anythingheroic, sad, funny, triumphant, tragic, good, evil. To tell a story well, you need to help the listener identify with the main character, whether he is struggling in a small boat against a rampaging sea, or risking his or her life to secure civil rights, promoting the status of women. What happened? Who made it happen? What are the results today? Where do we need to go? It is through history that we learn who we are and how we got that way, why and how we changed, why the good sometimes prevailed and sometimes did not.