History Matters
As we celebrate our country’s 250th all year long, let us enjoy more history from Maine’s summer resident David McCullough in Camden. His daughter Dorie and Michael Hill selected speeches and essays and compiled them posthumously into History Matters. Dorie McCullough Lawson worked with her father for thirty years and also wrote a novel and some nonfiction, too. Michael Hill was a long time researcher and even accompanied David and wife Rosalee on some Paris, France trips for The Greater Journey.
I must say I finally bought this new, special book after looking at it for several months, noticing especially McCullough’s paintings on the front and back endpapers: his Tisbury, Mass. home and small writing shed nearby where he typed away on the used Royal typewriter that clicked and “clinged” its rhythmic sounds.
Every chapter is worth a read, but I must say that Harriett Beecher Stowe in Paris got my immediate attention. Her Brunswick, Maine broadsheet publications of each chapter to Uncle Tom’s Cabin were a find for me at the Bowdoin College Library. Just imagine her writing and reading out loud to Bowdoin students before publishing each week in the newspaper.
McCullough tells the story of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book tour to London:
In Britain, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was acclaimed…Over half a million British women had signed a petition against slavery. In Paris…publishers were still scrambling to finish translations, but the novelist George Sand, writing in La Presse, had already called Mrs. Stowe “a Saint. Yes — a Saint!”
It was such a frenzy of crowds everywhere, Harriet’s husband decided to return home early to their six children. Fortunately Harriet’s brother stayed with her through the ordeal and they went on to Paris for a reprieve. It turned out to be a special time.
Paris offered Stowe some privacy and inner exploration of the many museums and quiet streets to stroll and breathe in peacefully with some anonymity. Her reflections on great paintings and comparisons to writers was a bit startling to me, but original.
Maybe today Uncle Tom’s Cabin is not appreciated like it was when first published. I gained new knowledge when I found A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The first chapter of that book by Stowe revealed slavery in Maryland not too far from my home in Silver Spring, Md. Newspaper reports reveal Stowe’s sources for her historically based novel.
How she wrote so many books, not just the world famous one we are all familiar with? David sticks to the narrow topic of her trip to London, mobs of admirers and Paris explorations. Always there’s new history from David McCullough for 2026, our country’s 250th celebratory year:
Gazing upward within the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Hatty felt a “sublimity” she found impossible to analyze or express. It was a long way from the kitchen table in Brunswick, Maine, where she had written Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a baby in a clothes basket at her feet.
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