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Review by Wyatt Wells
Historians stand between their subject and their audience. They sort through the various sources, deciding what is and is not important and condensing and summarizing this information for readers. This is useful work -- the raw materials of history are vast and, as a rule, poorly organized -- yet as a result students of the past, no matter how well read, too often lack a feel for the historical record. Witnessing America seeks to remedy this deficiency.
Witnessing America consists of dozens of first-hand accounts of American life from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Though it does not ignore the momentous events of these years -- the first English settlement of the continent, the Revolution, and the Civil War -- Witnessing America remains firmly focused on the experience of the "average" person. It tells not of the commanding generals but of the soldiers in the trenches, not of the captains of industry but of the foreman on the shop floor. Divided into 11 sections of approximately 50 pages each devoted to Arriving, Upbringing, Pairing, Working, Housing, Eating, Playing, Praying, Erring, Ailing, and Departing, Witnessing America recounts events such as an outbreak of smallpox among Indians in the Dakotas, a hellfire sermon by a Puritan divine in New England, a wedding on the Kansas frontier, a poker game among Texas cowboys, and much more. Numerous illustrations add a pleasing visual dimension to these stories.
Of course, a book like Witnessing America always begs the question, is it representative of the American experience? Probably not, if for no other reason than that the kaleidoscopic fabric of this country resists reduction to a single volume, no matter how carefully constructed. Moreover, Witnessing America draws from personal accounts -- diaries, letters, and memoirs -- and people are more inclined to note the unusual than the ordinary. For instance, this book contains several tales of settlers captured by Indians, even though such captives made up an extremely small proportion of the American population, even among frontiersmen. Nevertheless, Witnessing America contains numerous stories of daily life, and when it ventures to address larger subjects, its perspective is usually that of ordinary people -- the farmer, the soldier, the merchant, the housewife, or the slave.
Noel Rae has put together an engaging book. Witnessing America's many accounts will fascinate readers while, at the same time, giving them a perspective on and feel for the American past that they will rarely find even in the best conventional histories.
Wyatt Wells is the Newcomen Fellow in Business History at the Harvard Business School.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.
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