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

Here is a highly entertaining look at American history, a varied, imaginatively selected panorama of first-person accounts of moments in the country's story that stretch from an October 10, 1492, diary entry by one of Columbus's crewmen to a 1994 e-mail message from Bill Gates. The nearly 300 entries tend to be short, preceded by informative introductions. The result is a feeling for history that is both immediate and dramatic. National high points are featured: Benjamin Rush writes to John Adams about the day they signed the Declaration of Independence; officers on both sides describe the sea battle between the Monitor and the Merrimack; Black Elk talks of Wounded Knee; Orville Wright describes the first flight; Jack London covers the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire; Grace Gully tells how the news of Pearl Harbor reached FDR; Paul Tibbetts says how it felt to drop the first A-bomb on Japan; H.R. Haldeman remembers the first days of the Watergate cover-up. But smaller things are also described: what Cincinnati was like in 1828; how Barnum discovered Tom Thumb; how Hawthorne's editor got his hand on the manuscript of The Scarlet Letter; how a first baseman became the first player to use a baseball glove; how the AIDS quilt was started. Freelancer Colbert warns that just because an account is from a so-called ""eyewitness"" does not mean it is true or accurate, but his wonderful collection is a vivid reminder that what we think of as history is simply the memory of what might otherwise have been ordinary days. Every high-school kid in America should browse through this-and so should their parents. It's more fun than they might suspect. (Mar.)