DAVID MCCULLOUGH, AUTHOR & HISTORIAN: Because he‘s such an extraordinary story of an American who seemed to be miscast, seemed to be a fellow not prepared for the role that history had for him to play, and who not only lived up to the role, but went over the top, as it were.

And as an example of a man who came from very humble origins with very little advantage in the way of education or connections, he rose to be one of the most important Americans of his day.

The man that George Washington discovered, and the man that George Washington counted on through nearly eight-and-a-half years of the Revolutionary War, and who then counted on him as his secretary of war during the time that Washington was president.

He started out as a Boston bookseller. Big, stout, gregarious, robust, friendly, popular fellow who had about the equivalent of a fifth grade education, and who loved books and never stopped reading.

And he became one of the best officers in the whole war. Washington singled out two young men almost within a week or two weeks after Washington took command at Cambridge, Massachusetts, as people he could count on.

On was Nathanael Greene, who was 33-year-old Quaker who had been made a major general at the age of 33, having had no military experience at all. And the second was Henry Knox who was all of 25. And he had had no military experience at all.

But both of them had been reading books. What they knew about the military was entirely from books. But that was an age -- an era that believed that one of the best ways to learn things was to read books, the age of the Enlightenment.

And they are in their way, I think, wonderful examples, personifications of the Enlightenment faith, in that if you want to learn something, pick up a book or several books and get reading.

His daring, both physically and intellectually is remarkable. He and Greene were the only two general officers, officers who became generals, who stayed with the war, stayed with Washington through the entire war -- not with him necessarily physically personally right with him, but with him in the sense of still fighting the war.

All the others either dropped out or had to leave for some other reason. But those two that he picked right at the beginning, whom he admired for their perseverance, persevered to the end.

So it‘s an amazing story. But Knox had the idea of going to Ticonderoga and bringing back the great cannons and mortars there, which was a preposterous thought. Middle of winter and to haul those guns nearly 300 miles all the way down the Hudson Valley from Upstate New York, then across the Berkshire Mountains all the way to Boston, was a feat almost like something from myth.

But it was real, he did it. And he did it by seeing that the solution to the problem was in the problem. That the problem itself was the solution. The problem is its winter, how can you drag those huge cannon all the way in winter?

And the answer, of course, was to build giant sleds, or sledges as they called them. And that‘s what he did, against every imaginable kind of challenge, both from the elements and from the sheer exhaustion and danger.

There was one point when they were hauling them over the Berkshire Mountains when the teamsters that he had hired refused to go on because it was too risky, the hills were too steep, coming down was the hard part, not so much going up. If these things could get away they would kill anybody that was in front.

They wouldn‘t go on. These men said, no, it‘s too dangerous, we won‘t go on. So this 25-year-old bookseller mounted his horse or the top of a cannon or something and gave them a two-and-a-half, three-hour speech on why they should keep on going. And they did.

He wouldn‘t give up. That was the great quality with both he and Greene, not to say Washington, because that was among his strongest traits of character.

LAMB: This Henry Knox house replica which sits on Route 1 in Thomaston, Maine, is a place that you spent almost seven hours on a Friday afternoon and evening, signing autographs of you book, "1776," and then speaking to the group.

Why did you -- you‘re a bestseller, the day your book came out, number one and it has been number one ever since, why would you, after all the travel you‘ve done, do that kind of thing?

MCCULLOUGH: Well, I enjoy it. I like to do it. I like to meet people that read my books. I like to meet people who read books and care about American history so that I was very happy to make a book tour.

It‘s exhausting but it‘s also exhilarating. It was also very heartwarming, gratifying to see what interest in American history there is, everywhere. To give a talk in Los Angeles, which is 3,000 miles and 229 years away from the year 1776 in a world that is so different as to have -- to be unimaginable to those people who had participated in the Revolution, and there are the people in Los Angeles, the year 2005, who turn out in sizable numbers because of their interest in that founding time.

And that‘s, to me, very exciting, very gratifying. But here in the Knox House I feel strongly that these historic sites and museums are very important adjuncts or even major participants in how we educate our children and grandchildren.

To bring people here to this house, to bring people to a presidential home or to a great battlefield or an historic site of one kind or another, is to inspire and to open up the mind in a way that is not exactly like a book or a movie or an original letter, it‘s something else.

And I think these places speak to us. I think they speak to us very -- in a very moving way. And the idea that this house, for example, was designed by General Knox, that this was an expression of their time, their culture, what mattered to them.

This oval room here, for example, which would have been familiar to Knox because of the White House, let‘s say, is a very period piece speaks to us today. These two big fireplaces are all very important because it is a different time with different values, different notions of proportion, scale, what the good life can be.

Now this, of course, was the home of a very wealthy, prominent people who had risen high in the eyes of their country. But it‘s amazing, for example, to go to Mount Vernon or Monticello and hear grown up visitors saying that they‘re surprised to find that neither Jefferson nor George Washington had indoor plumbing or electricity.

And so when you come into a room like this, people might say, why would they have two fireplaces? And that begins to open up the realities of that earlier time.

We forget how much more difficult life was then, how much more inconvenient, uncomfortable, closer to the vagaries of nature and the hardships of living a rough climate such as Maine because we‘re so insulated from the facts of life as they knew them.

We‘re insulated from the cold, the heat. We‘re protected by wonderful drugs, medicines. We don‘t have to worry much about epidemic disease the way they did. We don‘t have to get at 5:00 in the morning to start the fire to make the breakfast.

And we don‘t have saddle our own horse or go out and take care of the stock. We don‘t have to leave the premises for the call of nature. We‘re softies compared to the people of that time.

And when you realize all that they had to do just to get through a day in peacetime or under the best of conditions, and then how they responded to real adversity, that‘s humbling.

Abigail Adams, in a letter to her husband when he was at Philadelphia in the Second Continental Congress, said that future generations which will reap the blessings will have no conception of how their -- of the hardships and sufferings of their ancestors.

And that‘s true, even for someone who lived as handsome a scale and style as did the Knoxes.

LAMB: You gave a speech at Hillsdale College back in April. And it kind of dovetails with what you just said about that period versus now. I‘ve got a quote written down I want to read back to you.

It says: "When all that matters is success, being number one, getting ahead, getting to the top," and you‘re referring to the attitudes back then to today, that the attitude is getting to the top, "however you betray or gouge or claw or do whatever awful thing is immaterial to get to the top. Do you think we‘ve changed since the John Adams or the Henry Knox era?

MCCULLOUGH: I do.

LAMB: And why?

MCCULLOUGH: Well, for many, many reasons. For one, their education, their notion of history was based on the classical mode, the history of Greece and Rome. Their understanding of virtue, honor, character, it was all derived from Greek and Roman history.

And the idea that those who are cast in the parts of importance on in minor parts have to live up to the role they have been assigned. And because they are on the stage of history. And if you have a sense of history, it isn‘t just that you have a sense that there was a lot that happened before you came on the scene, but that you also realize that when you pass from the scene, you will be part of what constitutes history. Very important point.

They think of themselves as they‘re going about what they do as being someday judged by history. If you go into the old Congress on Capitol Hill, in the Capitol, now Statuary Hall, up over the door there is a rendition of Clio, or Cleo, the goddess of history.

And she is in a chariot, and the chariot is holding a clock, a Seth Thomas -- excuse me, a Simon Willard clock, which was installed there about 1815 if I remember correctly. And the members of Congress, when they look up to see what time it is in their moment, their morning or their afternoon, they see Cleo writing in her big book, her book of history, to remind them, these members of Congress, these representatives of the people, that they‘re not just being judged by their own time, in other words, the time of the clock, but they‘re being judged for all time by history.

Now Washington, Jefferson, Adams, as can also be said for their opponents, the British, and the Loyalists, those who were convinced that they were the true patriots, they had an education which gave them that perspective.

And it‘s very wonderfully expressed in the play "Cato," which was the most popular play of the day. And in the play there is a line which goes: "We can‘t guarantee success in this struggle or this war, but we can do something better, we can deserve it."

And what that is saying is the outcome is not in our hands, there are too many other factors involved, including the hand of Providence or God or chance or circumstance or whatever. We can‘t control that as individuals.

And, of course, the individual and individualism are essential to the whole idea of the Enlightenment. But we can control how we behave, we can deserve it. So even if we lose, if we deserve to have won, we will have won in that sense.

Very different from the present day attitude and I think a very healthy reminder. There‘s a kind of a hubris about the present that everything we do is the right way to do it, or that everything we achieve is the ultimate achievement, or that those people who preceded us weren‘t quite as bright as we are, or weren‘t quite as savvy about life and the realities of what matters.

That‘s an arrogant and I think ignorant view of life. There is so much we can learn from history and there is so much we can learn from those people. And they are what interest me, the people.

LAMB: But what causes -- or what has caused the attitude of today in your opinion?

MCCULLOUGH: I think it has been caused by an enormous variety of choice which is sometimes benumbing. I think it has been caused by the stepped up momentum of life. And I think it has been caused by materialism, too much luxury.

Samuel Johnson says somewhere that what really does a people in is too much luxury, too much of a much. And lack of leaders, I don‘t just mean political leaders, but leaders of all kinds and of all faiths, genders, races, all kinds, who express the core values, to use the current expression, in ways that people are moved by.

There are several misconceptions. People say, well, we -- they lived in a simpler time. You see, though, I just saw it the other day in an article in one of the papers talking about those who lived in a simpler time, there was no simpler time.

In fact, I could make a good case, I think, that the 18th Century was a far more complicated time, a far more challenging time because of how much someone had to know just to survive, to get by.

If somebody said to me, you‘ve got to go out and ride in a wagon from here to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in December, and who would you like to take along with you? I would say, give me a couple of those people from the 18th Century, they would make it because they know how to do so much that we don‘t know how to do.

We are the simpler time in some ways. Now we are a more revved up time. We are a more self-conscious time. We are reported, portrayed, characterized, analyzed, endlessly every day as a people, constantly.

And so much attention from the press, from television about things that are of no real consequence. And it‘s very confusing and I think it also lends to many people a sense that whatever you can get away with if you can get what you want, do it.

Somebody does something that‘s off-track, and they say, well, at least he tried, you know. What kind of an attitude is that? You know, the old verities: honesty; kindness, generosity; ambition to exceed, to excel, that‘s different.

That‘s what Adams said. He said, I wish there were more ambition in the country. And by that he said, I mean ambition to excel. That‘s a different kind of ambition than to have a lot more stuff or to be able to swagger about and say you‘re number one or whatever.

LAMB: If you total up the "John Adams" books that you sold, 2.25 million or whatever, and if you sell at least a million-two that you printed on "1776," that‘s more people than were even alive in 1776 in this country.

How do you explain your success, though, if this is such a bad time and people – you‘re number one, you were number one with "John Adams," what do you do?

MCCULLOUGH: Well. I‘m not sure that I‘m a measure of whether we‘re in a good time or not. I don‘t think we‘re in a bad time. I think we‘re in a very exciting time. I think we‘re a little -- I think we are a little off-course now and then.

But if somebody said to me, which age would you most want to live in? I would like to most want to live right now. And there are many similarities between right now and the 18th Century.

Both are times of tremendous change, tremendous stress for people. Great technological change was changing the 18th Century just as technological change is changing our time.

What is different is the speed of change, the speed of information, the speed of -- and the throwaway culture. We don‘t just throw away Styrofoam cups, we throw away ideas. We throw away history.

There‘s an expression, well, that‘s history, take it to the junkyard, that‘s history. Nobody walks around today -- we Americans believe in what‘s new, in what‘s the future. Nobody says, hi, Brian, what‘s old? You know, they say, what‘s new? That‘s American.

Nobody turns over an old leaf, you know. That‘s all in our attitude toward life. But I think one of the reasons that books of the kind that I write and books of the kind that other historians and biographers write, the success of the History Channel, for example, the wonderful popularity of Ken Burns‘ films, all of that could be, could be in part a measure of the fact for about a generation or more, we haven‘t been educating our children very well in history.

And so a lot of people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, are trying to get caught up. They don‘t know who Theodore Roosevelt was. They know he was president but they have a very vague idea what exactly he did or why he was somebody of importance. So they want to read a book or they want to see the documentary on television. And I think some of the movies that have come along have been very effective.

I think we human beings are by nature interested in history. I just think it‘s part of our human nature. We want to know what happened before. Once upon time, long, long ago, the children‘s stories begin.

The two most popular movies of all time, while not necessarily historically accurate, are historical in spirit and in setting and the rest: "Gone With the Wind" and "Titanic." That‘s, I think, a very important measure.

Tom Hanks is now going to be producing a big multi-hour movie for television of my book "John Adams." And Tom Hanks is a very solid and conscientious man with great integrity and taste. And I expect that that movie will reach people in a way that maybe nothing else could in 10, 100 times more than my -- any book of mine might or other authors.

And if it‘s done right, that will be a huge step forward, in my view.

LAMB: Let me ask you a blunt question about that. Will they show John Adams without any teeth?

MCCULLOUGH: I hope so. I hope so. And so far all that I‘ve suggested about the tales of that time they have taken very seriously. And their efforts to make everything as authentic as possible is the most remarkable kind of integrity in that field, in that specialty that I‘ve ever seen.

LAMB: How many parts in the series?

MCCULLOUGH: I think it‘s 11.

LAMB: And where will it run?

MCCULLOUGH: On HBO.

LAMB: When?

MCCULLOUGH: Well, they are going to start filming, I believe, this fall, and how long it will be after that, I don‘t know. But they‘re building back lots outside of Richmond and a lot of it will be filmed in Williamsburg, and some of it on location in Europe.

LAMB: While we‘re on John Adams for the moment, what do you think are the chances of having a monument in Washington to him soon? And will it be just John Adams or John and Abigail or John Quincy Adams or the entire Adams family?

MCCULLOUGH: Well, this is still open to discussion and we -- the Congress has passed the bill making it possible. And the president has signed the bill. Now we have to work out a location.

I say we because I‘m part of a group that‘s trying to see this happen. And it has to be a location that‘s in keeping with his importance. It‘s really a disgrace, there‘s no monument, no statue, nothing to John Adams.

And in my opinion and the opinion of others, except for George Washington, he is the most important American of that time, of that Revolutionary founding time.

But if you want to know what I think it should be, I think it should not be another marble tomb or obelisk. And I don‘t think it should try to rival either the Washington Monument or the Lincoln Memorial or the Jefferson Memorial in scale.

I think it ought to be 18th Century in scale. In other words, it should be modest in size. And I am promoting as best I can the idea that it will be the Adams Library of American Letters. And it will be a library open to visitors in a garden.

Cicero says somewhere that his idea of heaven was a library in a garden. And John Adams thought that too. And if you -- I know you‘ve been to Adams House and seen the library that‘s in the garden there.

So this would be a library where you could come in and look at the letters, the real letters of John and Abigail Adams, or of John Quincy Adams, or of Jefferson and Adams, on display. And these exhibits would change from time to time.

And you could go out and be in the garden, if you wanted to sit on a nice bench, and it would be a garden of the kind that Abigail had at Quincy, with fruit trees and flowers and herbs and so forth.

And it would sort of an oasis in the midst of Washington. And there would be other exhibits as well from time to time. And the Library of Congress and the Massachusetts Historical Society, which are the great repositories of Adams family papers, have thus far said that they would be very happy to have some of their treasures on loan at the library.

And I think it would be in keeping with part of their great contribution to American life. It isn‘t just my view, it isn‘t just that John and Abigail Adams did what they did as patriots, as believers in the cause of America and independence and equality, but that they wrote what they did, they recorded what was happening. They described the people, described the feelings of the time in a way that no other couple did.

And that in itself, those thousands of letters were an enormous service to their country. I don‘t think they wrote them with that in mind, but that has been the result.

LAMB: A couple of minutes ago, Renny Stackpole, who is one of the leaders of this Henry Knox Museum, was showing us around upstairs in the bedroom of Henry Knox, I asked him how old he was when he died, he said, 56. And he died of a chicken bone in his throat.

And I wanted you to -- I mean, we talked about medicine earlier that I wanted you to go back to the time when he blew a couple of his fingers off, and at what age did he do that and what impact did that have?

You say in your book that he wrapped his hand, for the rest of his life, in a handkerchief?

MCCULLOUGH: Yes. Life was tough, as I‘ve said, life was tough then and people -- the way life battered people was apparent in their appearance. People had a crick in their neck or they had something wrong with one eye, or they were scarred or they were missing teeth, or they were missing fingers, or part of their ear because life beat up on you.

And there were no cosmetic surgeons, there were no orthodontists to fix teeth and the rest. And if you lost a tooth, you lost a tooth. And if you lost it at 25, there it was.

If you read the descriptions of the deserters, for example, which are the most vivid of all the descriptions we have of those 18th Century soldiers, and again and again, there is something physically noticeable about them.

Henry Knox lost the two fingers of his left hand, third and fourth finger of his left hand on a bird-shooting expedition when he was about 22, I would guess. And he kept it wrapped because he felt it was unsightly and he didn‘t want that to be -- distract.

Nathanael Greene walked with a decided limp because of a childhood accident. John Trumbull, the great American painter of the day, had the use of only one eye because of a childhood accident.

This is very common. But you see, they didn‘t let that stop them. John Trumbull became one of the great painters of the time despite the fact of having the use of only one eye, greatly altered his depth perception. And it‘s very interesting to see that the small versions of his famous paintings, the signing of the Declaration of Independence or "The Death of Warren" at Bunker Hill, the small paintings are much stronger than the large paintings that are on display in the Rotunda of the Capitol, in large part because of that problem.

If Knox and Greene had volunteered to serve in the Army of today, they would have been rejected because they were physically unacceptable. But they didn‘t let that stand in the way.

And in a way, it makes them more vivid somehow. They‘re more identifiable. They‘re like characters in Dickens. You would know them the minute they walked in the room. You would certainly know Henry Knox because he would be the biggest fellow in the room.

LAMB: You mentioned, of course, earlier, that Knox was 25 when he first got to know George Washington. You also talk about age, 43 for George Washington in 1775. You also mentioned -- I want to ask you this, you only mention Alexander Hamilton three pages in your book, and you say he was 19.

What were the parameters of the book, what didn‘t you write about in the book, and why so little on Alexander Hamilton?

MCCULLOUGH: Because I‘m never writing about what they‘re going to become later, that‘s beside the point. I‘m writing about what they‘re doing at that point. Alexander Hamilton and James Monroe both appear briefly, because they were very minor parts of the story at that point.

They were very good young officers, and they‘re portrayed as that. But they had -- they weren‘t people of real consequence in what happened the way Knox and Greene and others were.

I also write about people like Jabez Fitch who was a farmer from Connecticut, and John Greenwood who was a little fifer boy from Boston. And Joseph Hodgkins, a Massachusetts shoemaker who is one of my favorite characters of all.

And those people played a real part in that time, in that moment. We know because they wrote about it. You have to remember that all that we know is what we have in diaries and letters.

There were no correspondents covering the war, reporting what a terrific job Alexander Hamilton just did. Nor were there artist correspondents like Winslow Homer covering the Civil War.

All we have are orderly books, other -- and government records of various kinds, and the diaries and letters. So if somebody kept a diary, or wrote a lot of letter, it really pours it out, tells you what it was like, describes the scene, describes his own feelings, describes the suffering and the hardships, then that person becomes a protagonist because that person is taking us into the time.

I try as best I can to be of the moment in how I‘m portraying what happened because I think that‘s intellectually more honest in a way in that these people don‘t know what‘s going to happen next anymore than we do in our time.

They don‘t know what the outcome is going to be. They don‘t know that Alexander Hamilton is going to be secretary of treasury. Nobody is even thinking about that, they‘re thinking about, can I survive the next hour?

And they‘re very often in a situation where they don‘t know what‘s happening, confusion reigns all around. And that‘s important to remember if you‘re trying to get inside that time and understand the human situation and to feel it.

I don‘t think you can really know anything until you feel it, Brian. I think that you‘ve got to care. Otherwise you could get all the facts and figures and statistics in the encyclopedia. And facts and figures aren‘t necessarily the truth.

And I‘m drawn into the time and the experience as it happened to the people who were there. And if I have someone watching over my shoulder, judging me in my mind, in my subconscious mind, even, it isn‘t the reviewers or the other scholars, it‘s those people.

Are they going to read what I wrote or what I‘m writing and say, yes, you got it, that‘s the way it was? Or are they going to be saying, look, you‘re way off mark here, that‘s not what it was like, let me tell you what it was like.

And if there is a hereafter, I hope they can tell me, you did all right, boy, you did all right.

LAMB: When did you decide that there would be a book "1776"? Do you remember?

MCCULLOUGH: While I was writing "John Adams," at the point where I was -- where Adams was in Philadelphia and they‘re getting reports of what is happening in New York. And when the report comes back that the battle of Long Island has been a fiasco, that a thousand Americans have been taken prisoner, that more than 300 Americans have been killed, that Washington has been outflanked and outsmarted and then the escape from Brooklyn.

When I read all of that which was happening, which Adams, of course, was not taking part in, in writing biography, you can‘t stray off to write for five or six or 10 pages about something that he has no involvement in, I thought, you know, I would really like to write about all that was going on besides what was happening at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, and how much of all that was happening in Philadelphia depended on what this ragtag army under Washington, how they were performing, how much chance they had.

LAMB: When did you decide to call it "1776"?

MCCULLOUGH: After it was all written. I never decide on a title until the book is all written. I often don‘t know what the book is really about until it‘s all written. People say to me at the beginning, what are you working on?

Well, I‘m working on a book about the Revolutionary War and the year 1776. Well, what is your theme? I have no idea what my theme is. I hope by the time I‘m finished writing the book I‘ll know what a theme is.

But I also, at the end of the book, I can step back and look at it and say, well, I think this might be the title.

LAMB: What‘s your reaction to the sales? Are you surprised at all?

MCCULLOUGH: Oh, I was -- it took my breath away. It has been extraordinary and…

LAMB: What printing is it in?

MCCULLOUGH: I think it‘s ninth printing now.

LAMB: How many books total out there?

MCCULLOUGH: A million-and-a-half. The first printing was a million copies. And when the published told me that, I said, I hope you know what you‘re doing. It just -- I couldn‘t believe it.

And it‘s -- but, you know, the kick, the reward, the pleasure is in the work. That‘s really what matters.

LAMB: When did you finish?

MCCULLOUGH: In November of last year, November of 2004.

LAMB: You just said that you made your decision, inside the time you were doing "John Adams," on "1776."

MCCULLOUGH: Yes.

LAMB: Did you make the decision on the next book inside the writing of "1776"?

MCCULLOUGH: No, have not. I‘m still thinking about it.

LAMB: How big a tour did you do for this book?

MCCULLOUGH: Twenty-four cities.

LAMB: What is a vigorous 72-year-old man doing going to 24 cities selling a book that you didn‘t have to?

MCCULLOUGH: Oh, I like it. I enjoy it. It‘s -- there are some days when I thought, you know, I just can‘t do this. But then the next morning, come on, let‘s go. I like meeting people. I like people. I like seeing what‘s happening in the country.

And I can tell you, I went to many of the same cities for five years ago when "John Adams" was published. And to go back to the same cities and see how they‘re changing and how -- what exciting things are going on, new libraries, new convention centers, cities looking better than I‘ve even seen them look.

I think there is much to be very encouraged about by modern present day America, I really do. And people happy in their work and proud of their cities and optimistic. It‘s very reassuring.

I‘ve come back feeling better about the country. I come back feeling better about the time we live and more confident about the future.

LAMB: Give us a sense then of what kind of a next book do you think you want to do, because if you‘re energized that much five years later, just think of what it will be five years from now. But what kind of a book does the country need?

MCCULLOUGH: Oh, I never think about that. I never think about what the country needs. I think about what I want to do. What gives me a -- you know, that‘s it. What‘s -- because you have to live with these subjects, day after day. And if you aren‘t enthusiastic about the work…

LAMB: What‘s your inclination right now?

MCCULLOUGH: I‘m not going to talk about it.

LAMB: Why?

MCCULLOUGH: Because…

LAMB: We want to know.

MCCULLOUGH: Because I -- well, I have, of this morning, 24 ideas for a book that I would like to read. Books that I -- that don‘t exist, that I would dearly love to read, which has been part of the way I‘ve gone about it my whole writing career, life.

I‘ve been doing it for 40 years and I just trust in my own -- it‘s like -- I don‘t know what it‘s like. I just -- suddenly I know that‘s what. You can say something this morning, in this conversation, I would say, there it is, that‘s it, that‘s what I want to do. And I don‘t push it. I don‘t just get going for the sake of getting going.

Well, I‘ll give you an example. You‘re too good a guy, Brian, not to give you one example. I would love to read a book about everything that was going on in London during the Revolution. Wonderful, wonderful big subject.

There were loyalists who have gone to London, all these hundreds, thousands of Americans who are there. The American painters who were all there who are people of considerable consequence: Benjamin West, Copley, Trumbull.

Trumbull goes over during the war, they think he‘s a spy. Well, he might have been. They put him in the Tower of London for a while.

And there were a lot of spies on both sides. French spies, British spies, great material. And, of course, all the politics of the time with people like Edmund Burke and others who are on the side of the American point of view, to a point. They still call them "our colonies." And the milieu of it all, and the same kind of book could be written about the Civil War, too, all that was going on during the Civil War.

I would love to read a book about Charles Wilson Peale, the Philadelphia painter, who was into everything. You talk about the kind of 18th Century enthusiast who was a painter and a tinkerer with mechanical devices, an inventor, an archaeologist, a soldier, a politician, he was everything.

And he wrote wonderful letters and kept a great diary. He knew everybody. And the idea of doing someone who isn‘t a politician, who isn‘t a general or a soldier appeals to me.

LAMB: No interest in the present? I mean, you know, in your lifetime…

MCCULLOUGH: No.

LAMB: … writing about that?

MCCULLOUGH: No.

LAMB: No more Harry Truman?

MCCULLOUGH: No -- well, that‘s not quite the present, I think…

LAMB: I mean, in your lifetime.

MCCULLOUGH: In my lifetime, not particularly. I think I‘ll stay in the 18th Century. I really like it there and I‘m starting to know everybody. And I like the change. I like the literature. I like the art. I like the architecture, very much.

LAMB: How did you get to know Henry Knox?

MCCULLOUGH: Through his letters.

LAMB: Where did you find them?

MCCULLOUGH: Well, they‘re in a variety of places, most of them are -- were at the Morgan Library in New York. They‘re now at the New York Historical Society. But the diary of his trek with the guns from Ticonderoga, which I‘ve reproduced in the book, in the picture section of the book in its actual size, that diary is at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

LAMB: Are you still on the board there?

MCCULLOUGH: No. I‘m not, I‘ve never been on the board there. But I‘m very actively involved. That‘s one of the most wonderful collections in the country. It‘s three presidential libraries in one in a way.

It has all the Adams papers, all the John Adams papers and the John Quincy Adams papers, and a great part of the Jefferson papers.

LAMB: I wanted to ask you about the boards because you pop up a lot of -- everybody wants you on these historical boards, how many do you serve on now?

MCCULLOUGH: Well, at the moment I‘m on no boards. But I‘m as active as I can stay in working for Mount Vernon, and the Library of Congress, and the Massachusetts Historical Society, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the New York Historical Society, Monticello.

These -- and libraries in general, public libraries in general. I do a lot -- as much as I can to support and help make known the opportunities presented by public libraries, but also the responsibility communities have to support them.

I‘m an honorary member for a big drive now for the Pittsburgh Carnegie Library, which was the first public library that I ever went to. I owe so much to libraries. I owe so much to the Library of Congress that I will do what I can to help the Library of Congress for as long as I can.

LAMB: You have probably given Henry Knox more publicity than he ever had in his life with your book, wouldn‘t you say?

MCCULLOUGH: I don‘t -- I guess that‘s right.

LAMB: I mean, you don‘t see a lot about him.

MCCULLOUGH: No.

LAMB: But Mr. Stackpole told me that this house got 14,000 visitors in the last year. And that‘s relatively small, but a lot of the libraries‘ visitors going down. The new Lincoln Library is way up. But what advice do you have for a place like this located on Route 1 in Maine, easy to see, Montpelier, the house, when drive through it, to get people to come here and then bring it to life?

MCCULLOUGH: To encourage everyone who does come here to tell other people that it‘s a very worthwhile place to stop and that you can‘t miss it coming up Route 1. I…

LAMB: Anything they should do here, though, once they get people in to entertain them or inform them? How do you…

MCCULLOUGH: I think that the people come into these spaces, into these rooms and know the story. It‘s the story that pulls people in. You drive by a house and you say that that‘s a beautiful house and that nothing ever happened there, not too interesting.

You could drive by a house that looks like a shack and start telling a story of what happened there and people will absolutely be interested. I think that our affection as a people for historic landmarks, for historic buildings of all kinds has increased tenfold if not more in the last 30, 40 years.

The whole movement to protect historic buildings has grown in every part of the country. They‘re not just going in and tearing down old buildings because they‘re old buildings anymore, people really don‘t like that.

We lose something of ourself, we lose something of our soul every time an historic building or a beautiful building from a period of time is passed is destroyed. We‘re vandals. It‘s just not the right thing to do.

LAMB: We don‘t have a whole of time but I do want to switch subjects, because you have talked a lot lately about teachers. And you testified before Congress, given certain speeches.

This, again, is from that Hillsdale speech, and I want to read it: "We have to do a far better job of teaching our teachers. We have too many teachers who are graduating with degrees in education. They go to schools of education or they major in education and they graduate knowing something called education, but they don‘t know a subject."

We had some teachers at C-SPAN this summer and they weren‘t very happy when they heard you say that. What do you mean?

MCCULLOUGH: I think that a teacher ought to have a good liberal arts education and major in a subject, major in history or Spanish or physics or whatever, because a young teacher going to work for the first time in a classroom who doesn‘t know history or doesn‘t know biology and is required to teach that subject has a big handicap, needless to say, not just because they don‘t know the subject, but because they have no enthusiasm for the subject.

And most of us have been lucky enough to have had teachers in our past experience who were enthusiastic about what they were teaching. And it was that enthusiasm, that love of their subject that was infectious and that opened the door for us or threw open the window for us.

And furthermore, if the teacher doesn‘t know biology or history or mathematics, then they become much dependent on textbooks which are often far than we would wish -- far less than what we would wish. Some of them are abysmal. Some of them it would seem as if they‘re designed -- history texts, designed to kill any interest a youngster might have in history.

We have to have teachers who love what they‘re teaching and who use good books. The essential ingredients for education are not fancy buildings and lesson plans, the essentials of education are great books, great teachers and the midnight oil, hard work.

We don‘t emphasize work enough in teaching. Now I‘m talking -- these are all generalizations. There are superb teachers. And I think, as I said in that same speech, as I say every opportunity I have, there is no more important person in our society than our teachers. They count more than anybody. They are doing the most important work of anybody in our way of life.

I have a son who is a teacher. And I am as proud as can be that he is a teacher. And I know how much he has to put up with that is less than what one would want.

LAMB: What does he teach and where?

MCCULLOUGH: He teaches English literature in high school in Massachusetts. And he‘s a very good teacher.

LAMB: One of our teaching fellows this summer, they sent me a lot of questions for you here. I‘ll just ask one of them.

What is the reward for teachers -- this comes from Jennifer Morley (ph), who teaches in Tampa, and teaches high school. What is the reward for teachers who do have extensive historical knowledge and are excellent in their field?

In other words, do they get anything special when they are good?

MCCULLOUGH: Well, I think they get the same thing that one ought to get no matter what line of work you‘re in, is the reward of the work itself, and the knowledge that they are influencing hundreds, thousands of young Americans in the course of their careers.

I don‘t know what the statistics are on how many lives a teacher will touch in the course of a career of 25 or 30 years, but it must number to a sizeable crowd. And that‘s very important.

And the love of learning, to convey the love of learning, that‘s maybe the most important thing a teacher can do, because education only just gets rolling after you leave school, after you leave college or graduate school. That‘s when you really begin to learn, and when you really begin to read if you‘ve had that instilled in you.

LAMB: Some teachers are not very happy with the No Child Left Behind.

MCCULLOUGH: Yes.

LAMB: One of the questions Janet Lipson (ph) asks is, can any single exam give meaningful data regarding a student‘s understanding and willingness to participate in democracy?

MCCULLOUGH: No. It‘s simply a measure. It‘s a measure of how much is known or not known. When a youngster can‘t tell you who -- when a senior in a university, a good university, can‘t tell you who the commanding American general was at the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown, you know there‘s a problem.

Now whether knowing that it was George Washington will make you a better citizen, that‘s immaterial -- that‘s another question, but the fact that a person doesn‘t know that Washington was the commanding American general at the surrender at Yorktown indicates that student probably doesn‘t even know what Yorktown was or why Yorktown was important.

And if he doesn‘t or she doesn‘t know that, clearly she doesn‘t know much about the history of the Revolutionary War. And not knowing anything about the Revolutionary War is a pretty serious flaw and indicates that maybe we‘re not educating our children as well as we should.

There‘s no question that -- about the historic ignorance among young Americans, there‘s no question about it. It has been shown in countless studies and surveys, and anyone who teaches or lectures or spends time on American college or university campuses these days, as I do, knows that from firsthand experience.

LAMB: A recent statistic in The Washington Post was that 57 percent of the children born in the District of Columbia are born out of wedlock. And you say in one of your speeches that history ought to start being taught at the dinner table.

MCCULLOUGH: Yes.

LAMB: If you only have a single parent who is busy working two jobs in order to take care of the kid, how can you ever start at the dinner table?

MCCULLOUGH: It depends on how you allocate your time. How much time is that same family spending watching television? The average family spends three to four hours a day, the average American family, three to four hours a day watching television.

Now don‘t tell me you can‘t give up maybe an hour of television to do something of this kind. I think the dinner table conversation, and I‘ve had many, many people say they agree, from their own memories and experience, the dinner table conversation can be over the lifetime of a child -- lifetime at home, more important than school.

LAMB: What if they don‘t have any history of -- knowing history, the parent?

MCCULLOUGH: They know the history of their own lives. They can talk about what their fathers or mothers or grandfathers or grandmothers did, where they came from, what part they played in American life or American history. Or they could go to the library and get some books, the public library.

Look at the public library, there they are in every community, open, free, "free to the people," as it says on the Boston Public Library. Every -- all the knowledge, all the information, all the art and literature and ideas of history, of all time are available in the public library to everybody for free.

No other society, no other civilization in history ever had any such advantage, and we take it for granted. And people say, well, there‘s not enough money now. Of course there‘s enough money. Do you have any idea what we spend on lawn care or potato chips? Of course there‘s enough money.

How a society spends its money can be said -- also for how the individual spends his or her money, is a pretty good index of what matters to them. And our public libraries ought to matter to us.

You can get a complete education, college education, graduate school education by just going to the public library for free, which was part of the idea in the first place, that there should be no lid on people because they can‘t afford to go to college and universities. So we‘ll have a public place where they can all come.

LAMB: We‘re about out of time. When do you expect for us to see another David McCullough book?

MCCULLOUGH: I have no idea. How long a book takes is how long it takes. It‘s like Lincoln said about his legs. You know, somebody said, how long are your legs? He said, they‘re long enough to reach the ground.

I have no idea. It depends on how large the subject is.

LAMB: One last Henry Knox question. When you look through his life, the 56 years of his life, what one things looms the most important?

MCCULLOUGH: That the man had the capacity for a great idea, imaginative, innovative idea, and, and the capacity to make it happen. Ideas are often pretty easy, it‘s doing them that can be hard. He did both. He had the idea and he did it.

LAMB: Thank you, Mr. McCullough.

MCCULLOUGH: Thank you, Brian.