University Libraries Promotion and Tenure Recognition

I have admired the work of David McCullough since I read his book on the Johnstown Flood of 1889 when I lived in Johnstown years ago. He researches and writes with all the scholarship of an excellent historian, but he brings history alive and makes it readable to non-historians. In John Adams, McCullough gives us not only a revealing biography of President Adams, but also a chronicle of our country’s early days from revolution to the creation of a new nation. With it he gives us a deep appreciation of the amazing, incredibly difficult feat of forging from scratch a government unlike any previous one, and admiration of those who accomplished it.

The single glaring flaw of the new government was the existence of slavery. John Adams hated slavery, but he was unable to get the other founders to agree to end it, and he foresaw the civil war that would result from this evil. McCullough shows us Adams, and to some extent the other founders, “warts and all” in a fascinating look at our nation’s beginning.