Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm far A Dowdy and I'm to bling a charcoal boarding And this time we're going to pick up with an interview we conducted earlier this summer with author David McCullough. We got to talk to him about his new book, The Greater Journey Americans in Paris, And during the first half of this interview we really kind of just talked about the book and how it was almost an unusual style of book. It covers so many people, so many different Americans who travel to Paris during this long nearly hundred years span of time and accomplish a lot um. And we also got to talk to him then a little bit about his research specifically for this book, of a lot of it surprisingly took place here state side. Yeah, we talked to him about some things like his inspiration, how he picked his protagonists, um, a lot of questions that focused on the book specifically. But we stopped the first part of the interview there knowing that we had more to give you guys, but we wanted to give people a chance to pick up the book and be able to read it first, and we didn't want to give too much away, and we wanted Mr McCullough's words here to be able to kind of add a little bit of context to to what you got from the book and what you already knew. And also selfishly, we wanted to be able to take the chance to talk to him a little bit more about his own process, what really inspires him and how he does his research and puts a book together. Not too selfishly though, because I think it's really going to help all of you guys out there who are historians, are amateur historians, are just interested in conducting your own research. He gave us some really really great tips. If we're gonna tease you guys a little bit here at the beginning of this interview, Yeah, So basically, even if you haven't read the book, I think you'll really enjoy this part of the interview. But that comes later, and first we're going to get back to a greater journey. So the part of the book that I was most eager to talk about and to hear the author talk about was a chapter called the Medicals. In it, as the title suggests, Mr McCullough focuses on the this little world within a world of the greater book, and it features hospitals, famous doctors, patients of course, with all sorts of ailments. But his main focus here in this section of the book is the American medical students who come to Paris. There are people like James Jackson Jr. Mason Warren Oliver, Wendell Holmes, and where you really get to see how they come to Paris and really grow to love it, and not just the city, but the things that they're learning there. They get to attend these awesome lectures, they get to follow these illustrious doctors on their rounds and see them perform all these all kinds of procedures. But what really struck me as learning why they came to Paris to study in the first place. They came there because the education they could get in Paris was so far superior to what was available in America at the time. And it was really compelling this whole examination of the differences between the two countries in this respect, and it really became a story of the history of the medical field both here and there. But a big folks, a big part of the focus here was America although it was a story about Paris too, and so we really wondered how Mr McCullough crafted this part of the story, how did he choose what to keep in and how much to leave out. So here's what he had to say about that, Well, that I could have written an entire book on just that subject. I could have written an entire book on the friendship and the adversities they faced between uh. Uh John Samuel left B. Morris and James Ventimore Cooper. Uh. I could have written a whole easily, a whole book about Hellihu Washburn and his experiences. But I think in many ways, of all the subjects that I had to happily undertake in this book, the story of those medical students has stayed with me. Has um strengthened my understanding of the times better than anything. Uh. There are several aspects of it. That particular subject also, as you just suggested, illustrates not just where France was in development of medical training and in the practice of medicine, but how far back behind we were. And this is the case. In all of these subjects, you're learning about where we stood proportioned to the rest of the world, which I think is a healthy reminder in the for example, that we had fewer medical schools than there were states in the country. That most of the doctors in our country, this is in the eighteen thirties, eighteen forties, really right up through the our Civil War, most of the doctors never went to medical school at all. They were trained by other doctors, most of whom have never on a medical school. Uh. Medical students didn't make the rounds of hospitals as part of their training. Cadavers for dissection dissecting purposes were illegal in many states. Consequently, the bodies that were available were available in the black market, which meant they were very expensive. Which also meant that most medical students never got to dissect a human arm. First time they would ever start dissecting a human arm was on a living person, and at that time there was no not yet any anesthetic. Ether doesn't didn't commit until late eighteen forties. UH. The fact that most American women in that day would have preferred to die, literally would have preferred to die that I have a man examined their body. And since all doctors at that point were men, that meant a great many of these women died. It also meant that students never got to examine or make the rounds with a practicing physician, a teaching position of female patients over half the popular human population, so that when they began practicing medicine, they knew next to nothing except what they had read in books about the female anatomy, the whole process of birth, and the rest. And there were none of those social stigmas in France, either concerning the availability of cadavers for this dissection or the examination of the female anatomy. And so as Pauliver went to Holmes said in one of his letters to his parents he could learn more in two years there than he could in ten years practicing medicine at home. So it's really interesting to learn about how he did craft that story within a story. And I think to Blie, if that was your favorite part, mine was the account of the American minister in Paris Lahu Washburn, And I mean, it's it's just again, it is a story within a story. It's kind of this gripping central chapter in the middle of the book. But what really interested me about it, I mean, I enjoyed it so much that I flipped to the back of the book and started reading the source notes, and I came across a little note that mentioned this was an entirely new story. This, this journal, this account of Washburn's was was new to historians, and so we clearly wanted to ask Mr McCulloch not only about how he felt about Washburn's account, but how the account came to light in the first place. And here's what he had to say. I should say that I have been writing books now for more than forty years, and I have had the good fortune to come across material um of of surprising kind that had not been known before, both in quantity and and in small parts and pieces, and some of it has been very exciting. But never has there been anything quite like this. Eli Hu Washburn, our ambassador to Paris, arrived on the eve of the Franco Prussian War, and the Franco Prussian War, which started in the summer of eight seventy was a disastrous mistake on the part of the French and really totally unnecessary for Europe, and the German army very swiftly defeated the French army and marched on Paris, surrounded Paris, kept Paris under siege, and proceeded the star of the city. In this submission, eli U Washburn was the only minister, diplomatic representative of a major power who, of his own choice, stayed on, did not get out of the city, did not leave. All the others left, but he felt it was his duty, because there were Americans still in the city, to go through it all. After the siege ended nearly five months later, there was a brief period of comparative peace, and then all of a sudden, a horrific civil war broke out in Paris, French killing French uh to a degree that's hard to imagine. It was as if all the latent evil, violence, sadism, and destruction that's part of the part of the human nature erupted like a volcano. And to have it happened in this most civilized of all cities, this most um temperate, supposedly and educated, cultivated population, made it all the more god awful. Well again, wash Burned stayed through the duration of it. And if he had done only that, we would he would he would be somebody we should need to know more about. But he kept a diary every single day, and that diary has been unknown up until just recently, as part of the process of work on this book, my research assistant might Kill found the diary, or rather a letter press copy of the diary, in of all places, the Library of Congress, where nobody knew about it. We then managed to trace the location of the original diary, which is up in Livermore, Maine, where Washburn came from. And so I was able to tell the story of this terrible tragedy, this this bloody, violent spasm that Paris went through. Yeah, from an eyewitness, eye witness account that's not only new but is Fulsome these aren't just little jottings at the end of each terrific day that he went through, their long takeouts. The whole text transcribed runs to more than sixty pages, and that that diary alone is a window on those times such as we've not known about before. And that's part of the excitement of doing history. New things do come to light, New treasures in the way of letters, diaries, memoirs are found, and not just in a trunk and in somebody's attic, but in some of the great repositories of treasures that are known to everyone. So it's so cool to hear Mr McCullough talk about the joys of being a historian and talking about these little treasures like finding Washburn's journal. But it's even more interesting when you consider that McCullough didn't start out as a historian. He was born and raised in Pittsburgh, went to Yale, and I think I read that his first love was actually art, and then while he was at school he got inspired to write, and he actually started as a journalist career wise, so we wanted to know how he got his start as a historian. And here's what he said. Yes, I started out as a writer for magazine's Time in Life, and then I went to Washington during the Kennedy administration, who added a magazine for the Arab World. And I was young and very much over my head and trying to do seven things at once and to learn as fast as I could, And part of the way I coped with it was to work on Saturdays. And one Saturday, with the help of my wife, rose Leye, I was at the Library of Congress looking for material for a piece that we were going to illustrate in the magazine for the Arab World, and quite by chance, saw a collection of photographs taken in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, after the terrible, disastrous flood of I mean, I had grown up in western Pennsylvania. I had heard about it much of my life, Johnstown Flood, but I really didn't know what happened. And when I saw the the scale of the of the destruction and damage, the human tragedy of it in those photographs, I simply wanted to know more about it. What happened? How did this come to be? And I took a book out of the library and it wasn't very good. I had a number of questions that it didn't answer, And so I took another book out and if anything, it was even it was even less satisfactory. And so I to myself, why don't you try to write the book that you'd like to read? And once I started doing the research, once I got involved, got my hands dirty in the in the archives and the rest, I knew that that was what that was the kind of work I wanted to do for the rest of my life. And that was more than more than forty years ago. So I really liked Mr McCullough's idea that he writes the book he wants to read. I think that's a that's a great way to pick your topic. And I had read earlier that that's really kind of how he settled on many of the topics he's written about just personal interests. There wasn't enough information out there to read in an easy book for him when went out and decided to write it himself. So it certainly made us wonder what else was on his to read list, as in what other books did he want to get out there and write and research, And we asked him about that. I keep it list sort of marketing list, if you will, of ideas, and I guess the list probably numbers different ideas at the momentum which of those I may pursue or whether some other idea will suddenly pop into into focus because of something someone says in a conversation such as we're having or something I read. I don't know yet, um I I love the adventure of finding out. It's like working on a detective case. And the wonderful thing about our human nature is a curiosity, which is is accelerative like gravity. The more we know, the more we want to know, Thank goodness. So I've never undertaken a book about which I was an ex subject about which I was an expert. If I were an expert on the subject, I really wouldn't want to write the book because I already know the subject. I love the idea of landing in a foreign continent or a feeling of starting off and thinking this is going to take me three, four, maybe six years. But think how much am I gonna I'm gonna learn that? To me, I'm an I'm not a train trains the story. And I was an English major. I thought I would wind up writing I don't know novels or plays. Um, but I love to read history. And when I started reading compelling history by people like Shelby Foote or Barbara Tuckman, I thought maybe maybe I could do that. Um. It's it's so important for people, if all possible, to do work that they love, and to work with in the field where you are with people of a kind and help you to grow and broaden your outlook. I I'm always glad, of course, when my books have h welcoming readership. I'm always pleased when people tell me how much they like this or that that I've written about. But the real reward, the real prize that goes with it, is the work itself, and so I'm always a little sorry, a little down when it's over. And now for that really selfish question that we mentioned before, not just for us, of course, but for our listeners to We know that many of you out there are amateur historians, were professional history perfect sational ones. Maybe you studied history, maybe you didn't, Maybe you work as an editor like us, or maybe you work as an accountant or somebody something entirely different. But we wanted to know Mr McCullough's personal advice for turning history from just an interest or a passion into a profession. And he did us one better. He gave us a five point step by step list, and here it is. Oh I could I could really talk to you for a long time about that, And it's a wonderful chance to tell I hope some of your listeners a few things that I wish I had been told when I was starting. One is, be sure you pick a subject for which there is more material then you think you're going to need. Because you do need more material. I would say the ratio is probably twenty to one of what you accumulate what you know to what you finally put down on paper. It has to be that way. Uh. The second thing is to pick a subject that has a real story, and wherein the characters in the story, the protagonists and the secondary figures recorded what they saw, said, did so forth. An awful lot of life is talk. An awful lot of type of life is expressing the human um, the human side of our nature. Uh, dark or light uh in language. And you can't make that up if you're writing honest biography and history. You can't make up dialogue. I don't like to read and in a book of history or biography that as the as he walked from the old Executive Office building over to the White House, he was thinking about this or that. We have no idea what he might have been thinking about. Um. You have to you have to take it out of what's in the record as having been said, either in letters, diaries, or quotations, from transcriptions of trials, court transition transition transcriptions, or from newspaper interviews or accounts. You have to have a source. So you want to pick a subject for which there's lots and lots of material to work with. Think of it as processing or to make steel. You need an awful lot of it to make the steel. And secondly, when you go to a library, or maybe this is thirdly, when you go to a library or an archive, remember that it isn't just the books that are in that library, or the rare letters or diaries in that library, or the apps or the photographs that are of value. It's the librarians or the archivists. Talk to them, Tell them what you're working on, have them think about where you would best look or what you need to know. That's why they're there, that's their job. I think one of the mistakes students and others make is they try to hide because they don't want to be embarrassed by it. They try to hide how much they don't know. Be very candid about what you don't know, what you're trying to find out, and that you need help, and time and again, those wonderful people that are in libraries and professionals and archivists will not only help you at that moment, but they'll call you up two years later to say, remember that question you asked me or that subject you were trying to find out more, But I just found something I think you will really be interested in. I can't tell you how many times that's happened to me. How indebted I have been to those who helped that way professionally. The other thing is asked questions of all kinds of people. Don't hide what you're working on, don't keep it a secret. Talk to everybody you can about it, because you never know who knows something that might be of help to you, that might be beneficial. And work. Get down, sit down and start writing. Don't try to do all the research and then write the book. Start writing when you think you've done maybe a third of the research, because it's when you're writing that you begin to realize exactly how much you don't know and need to know. So therefore it targets your research more efficiently. And so i've i've I'm doing research all the time, from beginning to end. Uh, very often doing research. When the books in galleys or even page groups, I'm still doing research. And that's that's part of the kicks, that's part of the fun. The hard part is to tell yourself to stop re searching, because it is addictive, and you have to say, I got to start writing and just sit down. And my my advice is started at the beginning and and just proceed work every day. Don't don't put it off. It's easier if you work every day. So I know, Deablina and I were trying to take down notes while we were talking to him about these five tips and try to apply them immediately to our work. But I hope that they're also helpful to you guys out there who want to do more historical research yourself. And also I was kind of inspired by what he told us to about picking his career and doing something he really liked. It was it was great to hear from from somebody, and here's such kind of inspirational words. Yeah, and just that idea of creating something, you know, how he wanted to read something or see something out there and he couldn't find it and so he created himself. I mean, to me, that was the most inspirational part of it. It's just you know, having that motivation to do it. So hopefully we can all find a little bit of that. Definitely, So this is our second podcast of this interview, but we are definitely willing to keep the conversation going through social media through our blogs, which are on the how Stuff Works homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com, also on Twitter, misst in History also on Facebook. So if you guys have picked up their book by this point and read a little bit, you can definitely email us or or comment in some way and share your thoughts and we'd love to hear from you. Yes, we would love to know how you felt about the book, what parts were your favorites. You can write us at history podcast at how stuff works dot com, or you can look us up on social media, Sarah said. And if you want to find our blogs, you can find them by searching off our homepage for them. Our homepagees www dot how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how staff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The houst Works iPhone app has a rise. Download it today on iTunes

Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm far A Dowdy and I'm to bling a charcoal boarding And this time we're going to pick up with an interview we conducted earlier this summer with author David McCullough. We got to talk to him about his new book, The Greater Journey Americans in Paris, And during the first half of this interview we really kind of just talked about the book and how it was almost an unusual style of book. It covers so many people, so many different Americans who travel to Paris during this long nearly hundred years span of time and accomplish a lot um. And we also got to talk to him then a little bit about his research specifically for this book, of a lot of it surprisingly took place here state side. Yeah, we talked to him about some things like his inspiration, how he picked his protagonists, um, a lot of questions that focused on the book specifically. But we stopped the first part of the interview there knowing that we had more to give you guys, but we wanted to give people a chance to pick up the book and be able to read it first, and we didn't want to give too much away, and we wanted Mr McCullough's words here to be able to kind of add a little bit of context to to what you got from the book and what you already knew. And also selfishly, we wanted to be able to take the chance to talk to him a little bit more about his own process, what really inspires him and how he does his research and puts a book together. Not too selfishly though, because I think it's really going to help all of you guys out there who are historians, are amateur historians, are just interested in conducting your own research. He gave us some really really great tips. If we're gonna tease you guys a little bit here at the beginning of this interview, Yeah, So basically, even if you haven't read the book, I think you'll really enjoy this part of the interview. But that comes later, and first we're going to get back to a greater journey. So the part of the book that I was most eager to talk about and to hear the author talk about was a chapter called the Medicals. In it, as the title suggests, Mr McCullough focuses on the this little world within a world of the greater book, and it features hospitals, famous doctors, patients of course, with all sorts of ailments. But his main focus here in this section of the book is the American medical students who come to Paris. There are people like James Jackson Jr. Mason Warren Oliver, Wendell Holmes, and where you really get to see how they come to Paris and really grow to love it, and not just the city, but the things that they're learning there. They get to attend these awesome lectures, they get to follow these illustrious doctors on their rounds and see them perform all these all kinds of procedures. But what really struck me as learning why they came to Paris to study in the first place. They came there because the education they could get in Paris was so far superior to what was available in America at the time. And it was really compelling this whole examination of the differences between the two countries in this respect, and it really became a story of the history of the medical field both here and there. But a big folks, a big part of the focus here was America although it was a story about Paris too, and so we really wondered how Mr McCullough crafted this part of the story, how did he choose what to keep in and how much to leave out. So here's what he had to say about that, Well, that I could have written an entire book on just that subject. I could have written an entire book on the friendship and the adversities they faced between uh. Uh John Samuel left B. Morris and James Ventimore Cooper. Uh. I could have written a whole easily, a whole book about Hellihu Washburn and his experiences. But I think in many ways, of all the subjects that I had to happily undertake in this book, the story of those medical students has stayed with me. Has um strengthened my understanding of the times better than anything. Uh. There are several aspects of it. That particular subject also, as you just suggested, illustrates not just where France was in development of medical training and in the practice of medicine, but how far back behind we were. And this is the case. In all of these subjects, you're learning about where we stood proportioned to the rest of the world, which I think is a healthy reminder in the for example, that we had fewer medical schools than there were states in the country. That most of the doctors in our country, this is in the eighteen thirties, eighteen forties, really right up through the our Civil War, most of the doctors never went to medical school at all. They were trained by other doctors, most of whom have never on a medical school. Uh. Medical students didn't make the rounds of hospitals as part of their training. Cadavers for dissection dissecting purposes were illegal in many states. Consequently, the bodies that were available were available in the black market, which meant they were very expensive. Which also meant that most medical students never got to dissect a human arm. First time they would ever start dissecting a human arm was on a living person, and at that time there was no not yet any anesthetic. Ether doesn't didn't commit until late eighteen forties. UH. The fact that most American women in that day would have preferred to die, literally would have preferred to die that I have a man examined their body. And since all doctors at that point were men, that meant a great many of these women died. It also meant that students never got to examine or make the rounds with a practicing physician, a teaching position of female patients over half the popular human population, so that when they began practicing medicine, they knew next to nothing except what they had read in books about the female anatomy, the whole process of birth, and the rest. And there were none of those social stigmas in France, either concerning the availability of cadavers for this dissection or the examination of the female anatomy. And so as Pauliver went to Holmes said in one of his letters to his parents he could learn more in two years there than he could in ten years practicing medicine at home. So it's really interesting to learn about how he did craft that story within a story. And I think to Blie, if that was your favorite part, mine was the account of the American minister in Paris Lahu Washburn, And I mean, it's it's just again, it is a story within a story. It's kind of this gripping central chapter in the middle of the book. But what really interested me about it, I mean, I enjoyed it so much that I flipped to the back of the book and started reading the source notes, and I came across a little note that mentioned this was an entirely new story. This, this journal, this account of Washburn's was was new to historians, and so we clearly wanted to ask Mr McCulloch not only about how he felt about Washburn's account, but how the account came to light in the first place. And here's what he had to say. I should say that I have been writing books now for more than forty years, and I have had the good fortune to come across material um of of surprising kind that had not been known before, both in quantity and and in small parts and pieces, and some of it has been very exciting. But never has there been anything quite like this. Eli Hu Washburn, our ambassador to Paris, arrived on the eve of the Franco Prussian War, and the Franco Prussian War, which started in the summer of eight seventy was a disastrous mistake on the part of the French and really totally unnecessary for Europe, and the German army very swiftly defeated the French army and marched on Paris, surrounded Paris, kept Paris under siege, and proceeded the star of the city. In this submission, eli U Washburn was the only minister, diplomatic representative of a major power who, of his own choice, stayed on, did not get out of the city, did not leave. All the others left, but he felt it was his duty, because there were Americans still in the city, to go through it all. After the siege ended nearly five months later, there was a brief period of comparative peace, and then all of a sudden, a horrific civil war broke out in Paris, French killing French uh to a degree that's hard to imagine. It was as if all the latent evil, violence, sadism, and destruction that's part of the part of the human nature erupted like a volcano. And to have it happened in this most civilized of all cities, this most um temperate, supposedly and educated, cultivated population, made it all the more god awful. Well again, wash Burned stayed through the duration of it. And if he had done only that, we would he would he would be somebody we should need to know more about. But he kept a diary every single day, and that diary has been unknown up until just recently, as part of the process of work on this book, my research assistant might Kill found the diary, or rather a letter press copy of the diary, in of all places, the Library of Congress, where nobody knew about it. We then managed to trace the location of the original diary, which is up in Livermore, Maine, where Washburn came from. And so I was able to tell the story of this terrible tragedy, this this bloody, violent spasm that Paris went through. Yeah, from an eyewitness, eye witness account that's not only new but is Fulsome these aren't just little jottings at the end of each terrific day that he went through, their long takeouts. The whole text transcribed runs to more than sixty pages, and that that diary alone is a window on those times such as we've not known about before. And that's part of the excitement of doing history. New things do come to light, New treasures in the way of letters, diaries, memoirs are found, and not just in a trunk and in somebody's attic, but in some of the great repositories of treasures that are known to everyone. So it's so cool to hear Mr McCullough talk about the joys of being a historian and talking about these little treasures like finding Washburn's journal. But it's even more interesting when you consider that McCullough didn't start out as a historian. He was born and raised in Pittsburgh, went to Yale, and I think I read that his first love was actually art, and then while he was at school he got inspired to write, and he actually started as a journalist career wise, so we wanted to know how he got his start as a historian. And here's what he said. Yes, I started out as a writer for magazine's Time in Life, and then I went to Washington during the Kennedy administration, who added a magazine for the Arab World. And I was young and very much over my head and trying to do seven things at once and to learn as fast as I could, And part of the way I coped with it was to work on Saturdays. And one Saturday, with the help of my wife, rose Leye, I was at the Library of Congress looking for material for a piece that we were going to illustrate in the magazine for the Arab World, and quite by chance, saw a collection of photographs taken in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, after the terrible, disastrous flood of I mean, I had grown up in western Pennsylvania. I had heard about it much of my life, Johnstown Flood, but I really didn't know what happened. And when I saw the the scale of the of the destruction and damage, the human tragedy of it in those photographs, I simply wanted to know more about it. What happened? How did this come to be? And I took a book out of the library and it wasn't very good. I had a number of questions that it didn't answer, And so I took another book out and if anything, it was even it was even less satisfactory. And so I to myself, why don't you try to write the book that you'd like to read? And once I started doing the research, once I got involved, got my hands dirty in the in the archives and the rest, I knew that that was what that was the kind of work I wanted to do for the rest of my life. And that was more than more than forty years ago. So I really liked Mr McCullough's idea that he writes the book he wants to read. I think that's a that's a great way to pick your topic. And I had read earlier that that's really kind of how he settled on many of the topics he's written about just personal interests. There wasn't enough information out there to read in an easy book for him when went out and decided to write it himself. So it certainly made us wonder what else was on his to read list, as in what other books did he want to get out there and write and research, And we asked him about that. I keep it list sort of marketing list, if you will, of ideas, and I guess the list probably numbers different ideas at the momentum which of those I may pursue or whether some other idea will suddenly pop into into focus because of something someone says in a conversation such as we're having or something I read. I don't know yet, um I I love the adventure of finding out. It's like working on a detective case. And the wonderful thing about our human nature is a curiosity, which is is accelerative like gravity. The more we know, the more we want to know, Thank goodness. So I've never undertaken a book about which I was an ex subject about which I was an expert. If I were an expert on the subject, I really wouldn't want to write the book because I already know the subject. I love the idea of landing in a foreign continent or a feeling of starting off and thinking this is going to take me three, four, maybe six years. But think how much am I gonna I'm gonna learn that? To me, I'm an I'm not a train trains the story. And I was an English major. I thought I would wind up writing I don't know novels or plays. Um, but I love to read history. And when I started reading compelling history by people like Shelby Foote or Barbara Tuckman, I thought maybe maybe I could do that. Um. It's it's so important for people, if all possible, to do work that they love, and to work with in the field where you are with people of a kind and help you to grow and broaden your outlook. I I'm always glad, of course, when my books have h welcoming readership. I'm always pleased when people tell me how much they like this or that that I've written about. But the real reward, the real prize that goes with it, is the work itself, and so I'm always a little sorry, a little down when it's over. And now for that really selfish question that we mentioned before, not just for us, of course, but for our listeners to We know that many of you out there are amateur historians, were professional history perfect sational ones. Maybe you studied history, maybe you didn't, Maybe you work as an editor like us, or maybe you work as an accountant or somebody something entirely different. But we wanted to know Mr McCullough's personal advice for turning history from just an interest or a passion into a profession. And he did us one better. He gave us a five point step by step list, and here it is. Oh I could I could really talk to you for a long time about that, And it's a wonderful chance to tell I hope some of your listeners a few things that I wish I had been told when I was starting. One is, be sure you pick a subject for which there is more material then you think you're going to need. Because you do need more material. I would say the ratio is probably twenty to one of what you accumulate what you know to what you finally put down on paper. It has to be that way. Uh. The second thing is to pick a subject that has a real story, and wherein the characters in the story, the protagonists and the secondary figures recorded what they saw, said, did so forth. An awful lot of life is talk. An awful lot of type of life is expressing the human um, the human side of our nature. Uh, dark or light uh in language. And you can't make that up if you're writing honest biography and history. You can't make up dialogue. I don't like to read and in a book of history or biography that as the as he walked from the old Executive Office building over to the White House, he was thinking about this or that. We have no idea what he might have been thinking about. Um. You have to you have to take it out of what's in the record as having been said, either in letters, diaries, or quotations, from transcriptions of trials, court transition transition transcriptions, or from newspaper interviews or accounts. You have to have a source. So you want to pick a subject for which there's lots and lots of material to work with. Think of it as processing or to make steel. You need an awful lot of it to make the steel. And secondly, when you go to a library, or maybe this is thirdly, when you go to a library or an archive, remember that it isn't just the books that are in that library, or the rare letters or diaries in that library, or the apps or the photographs that are of value. It's the librarians or the archivists. Talk to them, Tell them what you're working on, have them think about where you would best look or what you need to know. That's why they're there, that's their job. I think one of the mistakes students and others make is they try to hide because they don't want to be embarrassed by it. They try to hide how much they don't know. Be very candid about what you don't know, what you're trying to find out, and that you need help, and time and again, those wonderful people that are in libraries and professionals and archivists will not only help you at that moment, but they'll call you up two years later to say, remember that question you asked me or that subject you were trying to find out more, But I just found something I think you will really be interested in. I can't tell you how many times that's happened to me. How indebted I have been to those who helped that way professionally. The other thing is asked questions of all kinds of people. Don't hide what you're working on, don't keep it a secret. Talk to everybody you can about it, because you never know who knows something that might be of help to you, that might be beneficial. And work. Get down, sit down and start writing. Don't try to do all the research and then write the book. Start writing when you think you've done maybe a third of the research, because it's when you're writing that you begin to realize exactly how much you don't know and need to know. So therefore it targets your research more efficiently. And so i've i've I'm doing research all the time, from beginning to end. Uh, very often doing research. When the books in galleys or even page groups, I'm still doing research. And that's that's part of the kicks, that's part of the fun. The hard part is to tell yourself to stop re searching, because it is addictive, and you have to say, I got to start writing and just sit down. And my my advice is started at the beginning and and just proceed work every day. Don't don't put it off. It's easier if you work every day. So I know, Deablina and I were trying to take down notes while we were talking to him about these five tips and try to apply them immediately to our work. But I hope that they're also helpful to you guys out there who want to do more historical research yourself. And also I was kind of inspired by what he told us to about picking his career and doing something he really liked. It was it was great to hear from from somebody, and here's such kind of inspirational words. Yeah, and just that idea of creating something, you know, how he wanted to read something or see something out there and he couldn't find it and so he created himself. I mean, to me, that was the most inspirational part of it. It's just you know, having that motivation to do it. So hopefully we can all find a little bit of that. Definitely, So this is our second podcast of this interview, but we are definitely willing to keep the conversation going through social media through our blogs, which are on the how Stuff Works homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com, also on Twitter, misst in History also on Facebook. So if you guys have picked up their book by this point and read a little bit, you can definitely email us or or comment in some way and share your thoughts and we'd love to hear from you. Yes, we would love to know how you felt about the book, what parts were your favorites. You can write us at history podcast at how stuff works dot com, or you can look us up on social media, Sarah said. And if you want to find our blogs, you can find them by searching off our homepage for them. Our homepagees www dot how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how staff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. 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