David McCullough, whose next book will be a history of Americans in Paris, remembers when he first laid eyes on the French capital. He was a freshman at Yale University _ young, in love, “impressionable.”

And at the movies.

“I went to see ‘An American in Paris,’” McCullough, speaking by telephone Monday with The Associated Press, said of the 1951 classic that won six Academy Awards. “I aspired at that point to be an artist, and there was Gene Kelly, who, like me, came from Pittsburgh, dancing all over Paris and enjoying to the fullest as a painter.”

McCullough’s romance with Paris, consummated when he finally visited there in the 1960s, will eventually be shared with his many readers. The million-selling historian, whose biography of John Adams helped start a wave of best sellers about the Revolutionary War era, is working on a book about the many artists and writers transformed by their time in France.

“It’s going to be quite different from anything I’ve done before, and that’s one of the reasons I’m so excited about it,” says the 74-year-old McCullough, whose previous books also include works on the Panama Canal and the Brooklyn Bridge.

“History isn’t only about politics and the military and social issues. It’s about literature and poetry and theater and music. ... I’ve been fascinated for a long time with how much of American history has taken place in France, more than any other country than our own, and how much France and the French have been an influence on the United States and our way of life.”

McCullough has won two Pulitzer Prizes, for “John Adams” and “Truman.” His most recent book, the million-selling “1776,” was published in 2005. An illustrated edition came out this fall.

His next book, currently untitled and scheduled to be published by Simon & Schuster in 2010, will begin in the 18th century, when Thomas Jefferson became the country’s most famous Francophile and end in 1939, when, McCullough says, the cultural center moved from Paris to New York.

McCullough plans on writing about Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Edith Wharton, Langston Hughes and many others. He will note the fabled Parisian adventures of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald in the 1920s, but not at length because “a lot of that is very familiar, and also because they were such self-promoters that I’m more inclined to write about other people.”

McCullough acknowledges the love-hate relationship between the U.S. and France, from accusations that Jefferson had been corrupted by his time abroad, to the recent wave of antagonism brought on by French opposition to the Iraq war.

But he believes that understanding the French is a way of understanding ourselves. He recalls a letter that John Adams wrote from Paris while on a diplomatic mission during the Revolutionary era, explaining to his family in New England why he had been away so long.

“He was apologizing for ignoring his responsibilities as a father,” McCullough explains. “He was saying that he wasn’t just in Paris to serve his country, he felt it was his duty to study politics and war so that his sons would have the freedom to study the law and architecture and other practical things. And their children will have the liberty to study art, music, architecture.”

A benefit of writing a book about Paris will be, of course, a little firsthand research. McCullough remembered visiting there in the 1960s with his wife, Rosalee. They arrived on a rainy night and walked and walked, so “thrilled, we hardly got any sleep.”

And what will he do upon arriving this time?

“Oh, go and have a good meal,” he said, laughing.