Touching America's History: From the Pequot War through WWII - Hardcover

Brown, Meredith Mason

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0253008336 ISBN 13: 9780253008336

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 2013

Synopsis

Things you can see and touch can bring to mind the time when the items were made and used. In Touching America’s History, Meredith Mason Brown uses twenty objects to summon up major developments in America’s history. The objects range in date from a Pequot stone axe head probably made before the Pequot War in 1637, to the western novel Dwight Eisenhower was reading while waiting for the weather to clear so that the Normandy Invasion could begin, and to a piece of a toilet bowl found in the bombed-out wreckage of Hitler’s home in the Bavarian alps in 1945. Among the other historically evocative items are a Kentucky rifle carried by Col. John Floyd, killed by Indians in 1783; a letter from George Washington explaining why he will not be able to attend the Constitutional Convention; shavings from the scaffold on which John Brown was hanged; a pistol belonging to Gen. William Preston, in whose arms Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston bled to death after being shot at the Battle of Shiloh; and the records of a court-martial for the killing by an American officer of a Filipino captive during the Philippine War. Together, the objects call to mind nothing less than the birth, growth, and shaping of what is now America.

About this title

Book Description:

2014 AAUP Public and Secondary School Library Selection

About the Author:

Meredith Mason Brown is author of Frontiersman: Daniel Boone and the Making of America.

About this edition

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0253008336
• ISBN 13: 9780253008336
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288