Witnessing America: The Library of Congress Book of First-Hand Accounts of Public Life - Hardcover

Rae, Noel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670864005 ISBN 13: 9780670864003

Publisher: Viking Adult, 1996

Synopsis

First-hand accounts by ordinary Americans describe what it was like to live in a log cabin, face a stampede, pan for gold, be whipped, work in a sweatshop, and confront many other experiences. 50,000 first printing. $50,000 ad/promo. Tour.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

This extraordinary, vibrant compendium of the American experience stitches together hundreds of first-person accounts by ordinary as well as famous individuals. Here is Mark Twain on trying to chew tobacco at age seven under peer pressure, Thoreau on a shipwreck, W.E.B. Du Bois on teaching in rural Tennessee, Benjamin Franklin on the passions of youth, Louisa May Alcott on making ends meet, Dr. Benjamin Rush on treating a yellow fever epidemic, Plymouth, Mass., Governor William Bradford on the 1620 crossing of the Mayflower, along with testaments by Emma Goldman, Richard Henry Dana, Dorothea Dix. One hundred illustrations drawn from the Library of Congress?posters, lithographs, ads, rare photographs, broadsides?feature Jacob Riis's gritty portraits of Manhattan's Lower East Side, a McGuffey's Eclectic Primer, E.S. Curtis's photograph of a Native American wedding. Chapters cover immigrant life, schools, courtship, love and marriage, work, households, eating and drinking, enduring hard times, religion, crime, illness and death, with accounts that take us inside slave ships, sweatshops, insane asylums, Shaker communities, Pueblo Indian villages, frontier trading posts, a Ku Klux Klan cell, a funeral in a California gold-mining camp. A useful reference and a great book for browsing. Rae is former executive director of Reader's Digest Condensed Books; Billington is Librarian of Congress. 50,000 first printing; $50,000 ad/promo.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Former executive director of Reader's Digest Condensed Books and editorial director of the Selected Reader Book, Rae has tapped the riches of the Library of Congress's vast holdings for this compilation of firsthand accounts of 300 years of life in America. Rae has organized the book around 11 themes, from arrival in the New World through the rhythms of daily life, such as working, praying, eating, and dying. The writers range from prominent early Americans such as Cotton Mather to an obscure Miss Manners of the frontier, though the focus is on the lesser known rather than the elite. Within chapters, entries are arranged chronologically and extend in length from less than a page to ten pages, each with an introduction that is usually too brief to provide adequate context. The obvious value of such a book is its accessibility?readers can open and enjoy it at any point. They will be treated to a rich and varied mosaic of American experience before the 20th century. The editor's decision to preserve the original spelling, punctuation, and capitalization, along with period illustrations, further contributes to the charm of the book. A likely candidate for all public libraries.?Nicholas Burckel, Marquette Univ. Libs., Milwaukee
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0670864005
• ISBN 13: 9780670864003
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 576