I had been writing for about twelve years. I knew pretty well how you could find things out, but I had never been trained in an academic way how to go about the research.

In December 2012 Allegheny County Pennsylvania announced that it would rename the 16th Street Bridge in Pittsburgh in honor of McCullough. " He started it as a book about the founding fathers and back-to-back presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson; but dropped Jefferson to focus on Adams. In 2003 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected McCullough for the Jefferson Lecture the U.

McCullough's two Pulitzer Prize-winning books Truman and John Adams have been adapted by HBO into a TV film and a mini-series respectively. McCullough's most recent history The Greater Journey (2011) is about Americans in Paris from the 1830s to the 1900s.