If you were in the middle of your junior year in college and wanted suggestions for books on the American War of Independence, I would not recommend McCullough- there are plenty of better ones, deeper ones, over in the Booklist ( take a look!) . But if you're just starting out, just getting acquainted with the Founders is good to do ( they were important) and McCullough is fun to read.

History used to be dominated by the Great Man theory, AKA Whig History, that tended to focus on Elite White Males- in large part because younger people like you were supposed to be taught to see history as heroes and villains, and to admire the heroes and jeer at the villains. It created a distorted picture of the past and ignored very important questions. So, when popular writers like McCullough and Chernow sell lots of books on the Founders, historians can get nervous that we're going backwards to all that.

If you want to be a history professor, however, you'll discover you have to read a lot of books. In fact, one important qualification for the job is being able to read good books, bad books, stupid books, and books you dislike- all the way through- and then think about them. You've already begun doing that, thinking about McCullough. So, you're off to a good start.

David McCullough is a fine writer of popular narrative history; meaning that he writes beautifully in an easy to digest prose. Therein lies part of the problem with McCullough, at least as far as professional historians are concerned. His books are roughly historically accurate, he is not writing a novel, but they do not really contribute anything new to historical debate. Popular history books as exemplified by McCullough's seldom engage in a serious arguments about historical figures and events. Diverting the narrative into intellectual jousts with other scholars or a lengthy discussion about methodology frequently alienates a mass audience and disrupts the narrative. The result is that popular history seldom approaches historical topics from a novel angle or uncovers new primary sources. instead, popular historians frequently rehash older narratives and ideas. While this might be acceptable for laymen, professional historians tend to find this uncritical regurgitation rather galling. For instance, McCullough pushes a very unsubtle and positive narrative of American exceptionalism, a contention that would necessitate a significant qualification for an academic historian's peer-reviewed work. David Greenberg neatly summed up this methodological problem thus in a History News Network/Slate piece:

The major failing of much popular history is that it betrays no interest in making intellectual contributions to our understanding of an issue. The Barnes & Noble historian seems to treat history as a pageant of larger-than-life events and people to be marveled at, rather than a set of social, political, and cultural problems to engage. Unless you wrestle with the ways in which the problems of the past have been defined, interpreted, ignored, or mischaracterized by other historians—the historiography—your writing will seem unsophisticated. You won't know which of your ideas are novel or trite, simple or complex, suspiciously trendy or embarrassingly out of date, or what avenues of research have already been pursued. Historians have to try to build upon what's been written, while keeping in mind that the goal is broader than just revising or applying other scholars' findings.

In the case of David McCullough, he frequently relies upon a narrow base of primary sources and a selective use of secondary sources to buttress the veracity of his narrative. This has led to some mistakes on McCullough's part. For example, John Adams misquoted Jefferson, claiming Jefferson called Adams "the colossus of independence.” The problem was Jefferson did utter this and McCullough pulled the quote from a book on Daniel Webster. While a misquote like this might seem like a tempest in a teapot -and to a degree, it is - it reflects how McCullough's biases can promote a casual disregard for historical methodology. McCullough, both in his books and his statements as a public intellectual, toes to a very triumphalist line that stresses American exceptionalism. This teleology seeps into his narratives and has the potential to seriously distort his interpretation of events because he twists them around this triumphalism. His recent book on the West, Pioneers is a pretty bad example of this. Andrew Iseenberg's Washington Post review partly noted that the settled heroes of the book that McCoullough's villains were more compelling characters.

That said, David McCullough is still an enjoyable author to read and there are far worse popular historians out there like Bill O'Reilly. He is a good introduction to people and events for historical novices, but he is never to be the final word on any historical subject.

I have a book recommendation for you that will offer a very different but important perspective on US history than what you have gotten from McCulluogh, and probably from what you are getting in school. It's called Why You Can’t Teach United States History Without American Indians ed. by Susan Sleeper-Smith. Each essay is written by a different historian who takes a common topic taught in a US survey course but analyzes it from the perspective of the relationship between the American empire and Indigenous peoples. These are topics which your US history classes have probably not taught with much attention paid to how Native Americans factored into what was going on, like slavery, the Gold Rush, the Civil War, urbanization, the New Deal, religious freedom, etc.

The book also has some chapters that will make you think critically about how US history has been presented to you in school. For example, there are two amazing chapters that analyze the way maps of US history are drawn in textbooks - and how they are often designed to leave out Native territories, cities, travel networks, etc. If you are aspiring to be a history professor (which is an awesome thing to aspire to!), a book like this can help get the wheels turning around questions like: Who decided what I learn about US history? Why did they decide that? Who does their narrative leave out? Who does it benefit to leave Native American agency and diversity out of US history classes, and who does it hurt? These are the sorts of questions historians ask ourselves all the time.