founding year of the United States, focusing on George Washington, the amateur army, and other struggles for independence. Because of McCullough's popularity, its initial printing was 1.25 million copies, many more than the average history book. Upon its release, the book was a number one best-seller in the United States. A miniseries adaptation of 1776 was rumored. McCullough considered writing a sequel to 1776. However, he signed a contract with Simon & Schuster to do a work about Americans in Paris between 1830 and 1900, The Greater Journey, which was published in 2011. The book covers 19th-century Americans, including Mark Twain and Samuel Morse, who migrated to Paris and went on to achieve importance in culture or innovation. Other subjects include Benjamin Silliman, who had been Morse's science teacher at Yale, Elihu Washburne, the U.S. Ambassador to France during the Franco-Prussian War, and Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor in the United States. McCullough's The Wright Brothers was published in 2015. The Pioneers followed in 2019, the story of the first European American settlers of the Northwest Territory, a vast American wilderness to which the Ohio River was the gateway. Personal life In 1954, McCullough married Rosalee Barnes; the couple had first met as teenagers, and they remained together until her death on June 9, 2022. They had five children. In 2016, the couple moved from the Back Bay of Boston to Hingham, Massachusetts; three of his five children also lived there . He had a summer home in Camden, Maine. McCullough's interests included sports, history, and visual art, including watercolor and portrait painting. His son, David Jr., an English teacher at Wellesley High School in the Boston suburbs, achieved sudden fame in 2012, when he gave a commencement speech in which he repeatedly told graduating students that they were "not special"; his speech went viral on YouTube. Another son, Bill, is married to the daughter of former Florida governor Bob Graham. A registered independent, McCullough typically avoided publicly commenting on contemporary political issues. When asked to do so, he would repeatedly say, "My specialty is dead politicians." During the 2016 presidential election season, he broke with his custom to criticize Donald Trump, whom he called "a monstrous clown with a monstrous ego." McCullough taught a writing course at Wesleyan University and was a visiting scholar at Cornell University and Dartmouth College. After a period of failing health, McCullough died