9780679442240

Your Satisfaction is Guaranteed:

• 30 Day Return Policy
• Bookseller Guarantee
• Privacy & Security Policy

Thomas Jefferson complains about haggling over the Declaration of Independence ... Jack London guides us through the rubble of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake ... Langston Hughes visits the Scottsboro Boys on death row ... Andy Warhol paints the scene at Studio 54 ... John Seabrook receives e-mail from Bill Gates. Three hundred eyewitnesses -- some famous, some anonymous -- give their personal accounts of the great moments that make up our past, from Columbus to cyberspace, and infuse them with a freshness and urgency no historian can duplicate.David Colbert has brought together a multitude of voices to create a singularly rich American narrative. Here are the vivid impressions of men and women who were witnesses to and participants in these and other dramatic moments: the first colony in Virginia, the Salem witch trials, the Boston Tea Party, the Oklahoma land rush, the Scopes Trial, the bombing of Nagasaki, the lunch-counter sit-ins at the outset of the civil rights movement, New York City's Stonewall Riot, the fall of Saigon, and the 1992 Los Angeles riots.With unparalleled and thrilling immediacy, these excerpts from diaries, private letters, memoirs, and newspapers paint a fascinating picture of the evolving drama of American life.

"What ultimately emerges from the palimpsest of American culture, perhaps inevitably, is the dwindling of the civic ideal in a nation beset with problems of its own making."

James Conaway, Civilization, April 1997

"None but the pickiest churl could find a significant omission in this compilation. It's all here, chronologically, from Columbus to Bill Gates."

Smithsonian, August 1997

Eyewitness to America: 500 Years of America in the Words of Those Who Saw It Happen: Search Results