David McCullough brings 19th-century Americans' Parisian experiences to life

Getting to Paris in the 19th century was no easy task. But for countless Americans who made the voyage, the physical crossing of the Atlantic was only the beginning.

"Great as their journey had been by sea," writes author David McCullough, "a greater journey had begun, as they already sensed, and from it they were to learn more, and bring back more of infinite value to themselves and to their country than they yet knew."

This is the story that Pulitzer Prize-winning historian McCullough tells in his latest book, "The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris" (Simon and Schuster), $37.50).

The book traces the Parisian experience of a disparate group of Americans who came for art, for medicine, for service and for other reasons between 1830 and 1900. Their undertakings are skillfully woven together to provide context and meaning that takes the reader on a "greater journey" as well, through a section of American history that has been largely unexplored.

Many of them are familiar names: James Fenimore Cooper, Samuel F.B. Morse, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Charles Sumner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent. But others are hardly remembered at all: Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female physician in the United States; Elihu Washburne, the American ambassador who lived through the horrors of the Franco-Prussian War Siege of Paris and the Commune revolt; Augustus Saint-Gaudens, sculptor of major American statues; William Wells Brown, a fugitive slave who became America's first black novelist and playwright.

"I was interested in what they brought home, both figuratively and literally," McCullough said in a telephone chat from Massachusetts.

They brought home paintings and sculpture and books and diaries. But they also brought home ideas that changed America, McCullough said. "Charles Sumner, who was stunned to see black students being treated as equals in classes at the Sorbonne, became one of the most powerful voices for abolition in the U.S. Senate. Samuel F.B. Morse returned with the idea for his telegraph. Emma Willard came home with new and progressive ideas for education."

Through their eyes and experiences, and those of many others like them, McCullough hopes readers will realize two very important points: "History, as I've always said, is more than politics and military actions. It is medicine, art, literature, science. All that is an important part of who we are."