In these unsettled, often degraded times we live in, I find myself reading more history than usual to remind myself of greater days and larger souls, of founders and first principles. I’m sure I’m looking for reassurance that all is well in the republic in the long run, and that this, too, shall pass. But I’m also seeking clarity, to remind myself of our core mission and core beliefs as a country and how others carried them forward in troubling times.

My favorite guide to the guideposts of the past undoubtedly has been David Mccullough, who passed away just last week after an extraordinary career fraternizing with the better angels

of our history.

His works on President Truman and Founding Father John Adams won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 and 2002, respectively. He also won the National Book Award twice. He’s written about Teddy Roosevelt, the Wright Brothers, Americans in Paris and great achievements in American history like the Brooklyn Bridge and the Panama Canal. He also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States.

Mccullough has a tie to Colorado in that his son went to college here (and was a classmate of mine).

In a wonderful lecture called “On the Course of Human Events,” Mccullough reminds us why it’s so important to take the long view in times like these.

“Those brave, high-minded people of earlier times gave us stars to steer by — a government of laws not of men, equal justice before the law,

imposritzaen:ce44of the individual, the ideal of equality,

religion, freedom of thought and expression, and the love of learning. From them, in our own dangerous and promising

we can take heart.” Mccullough told a story in that lecture of a much darker eetlhpanfathdisg: ejasrly 1942,

were nearly to Moscow, and half our navy had been destroyed

Psesartlrhsavrbhor and no one was really sure the Nazi war machine could be stopped.

It was then, in 1942, that the classical scholar Edith Hamilton issued a new edition of her book, “The Greek Way,” in which she wrote this in her preface: “I have felt while writing these chapters a fresh realization of the refuge and strength the past can be to us in the troubled present. …” It is in reading history where we can “catch sight of values that are stable, which no selfish and timorous preoccupations can make waver, because they are the hardwon permanent possessions of humanity. … When the world is storm-driven and the bad that happens and the worse that threatens are so urgent as to shut out everything else from view, then we need to know all the strong fortresses of the spirit which men have built through the ages.”

President Joe Biden recently met with a passel of historians to help put his presidency and our times in some perspective. Such meetings of historians and presidents have been a regular occurrence since the Reagan days.

The historians hosted by Biden had dire news. They warned him that there is real chance we could blow our inheritance.

They warned that our democracy, our birthright and bequest, is teetering on the edge right now, as are democracies the world over. They compared the threat facing America to the pre-civil War era, when Lincoln warned that a “house divided cannot stand,” and to pro-fascist movements that plagued America before World War II.

All those great and worthy people that came before, we owe them more than our current bomb throwing at each other, I would argue.

To let democracy degrade like this does not honor the sacrifices of George Washington or Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Ernie Pyle or Martin Luther King. We owe them better. My God, the thing they built! Our colossal inheritance of liberty is too magnificent a gift for us to squander in our present-day pettiness.

The Greatest Generation is fading before our very eyes, and I lament what the country is losing as they leave. What generation are we that is replacing them? The Leastest Generation?

In his great lecture back in 2003, Mccullough said it is essential to remember our forefathers and mothers as individual mortal beings no more perfect than are we. “It is also essential to understand that they knew their own great achievements to be imperfect and incomplete.”

The American experiment was from its start an unfulfilled promise, he reminds. There is much work still to be done. “There were glaring flaws to correct, unfinished business to attend to, improvements and necessary adjustments to devise in order to keep pace with the onrush of growth and change and expanding opportunities.”

Rereading some of his passages after his death, I am reminded that Mccullough is my favorite historian because he turned such history lessons into music for my ears. His books read like page-turning thrillers.

“I hear all the notes, but I hear no music,” is the old piano teacher’s complaint. “There has to be music,” Mccullough said in his speech. “History at best has to be literature, or it will go to dust.”

My wife and I once spent an unforgettable night in the company of Mccullough at a restaurant in Washington, D.C., with his good friend Al Simpson and Al’s son and wife. There was great conversation and wine and laughing, but no lecture, no sadness, no lamenting of the present as a poor imitation of more glorious pasts.

To my surprise and joy, there was mostly singing. Loud and lusty singing, that made the rest of the restaurant turn their heads, stop their meals and watch and smile — and eventually join in. Old songs that the octogenarians among us remembered fondly, like “Chattanooga Choo-choo,” “Putting on the Ritz,” “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” and “It’s a Wonderful World.”

That night stands in my memory as the singing of Americana, of old songs that bind us together. That historical music, and the music of history, just might be where we find our footing again and continue the song of America. And maybe instead of forgetting or besmirching our past greatness, maybe history can help us add our own verses.

“Blessed we are,” Mccullough said at the end of his great lecture. “And duty bound, to continue the great cause of freedom, in their spirit and in their memory and for those who are to carry on next in their turn.

“There is still much work to be done, still much to learn.”