Witness to America: A Documentary History of the United States from the Revolution to Today

Witness to America, a marvelous anthology of eyewitness accounts to key events in American history, opens with an act of rebellion: the Boston Tea Party of November 1773, when American tax resisters dressed as Mohawk Indians boarded a British vessel and dumped its cargo of tea overboard to protest a newly imposed duty on the much-used stimulant. It closes with another act of rebellion: the attempted impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton, the long-sought dream of the makers of the so-called Republican Revolution of 1994. The first was reported by a participant, George Hewes, the second by a journalist, Michael Kinsley; but both acts reveal much about the values of the nation with the passage of time, and both documents will be of value to anyone seeking to understand America's political history now and in the future.

Editors Stephen E. Ambrose and Douglas Brinkley, who are among the best-known American historians working today, understand the importance of such firsthand accounts to chroniclers of the past. They also understand that for too many Americans, "the word history implies an arid pedantry associated with dusty libraries and musty monographs." They've chosen the documents in this first-rate anthology with an eye to proving that history need not be dull, and the selections tell much that the standard textbooks do not, whether it be the mule-meat-and-bad-bean diet of the Confederates besieged at Vicksburg or the cold-war ravings of Beat Generation patron saint Jack Kerouac. At once entertaining and highly instructive, this book belongs in every history buff's library. --Gregory McNamee