I Wish I’d Been There brings together twenty of our
most distinguished historians’ responses to the question “What
scene or incident in American history would you most liked to have
witnessed—and why?” The answers illuminate crucial moments in our
past and give readers a front-row seat at some of American
history’s most dramatic events.The Salem witch trials, the raid on
Harper’s Ferry, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the voting
rights march on Selma, the beginnings of the Vietnam War—all of
these and more are vividly recreated here by a stellar list of
contributors, including Mary Beth Norton, Joseph Ellis, Carol
Berkin, Geoffrey Ward, Robert Dallek, Jay Winik, Robert Cowley,
Carolyn Gilman, and William Leuchtenburg, among other luminaries of
the profession. With imagination, insight, and vivid detail, I
Wish I’d Been There is an engaging tour through key events in
American history.
If she could be a fly on the wall at a pivotal moment in
American history, Mary Beth Norton would have witnessed the Salem
witch trials. These were driven not by greed or, as Arthur Miller
would have it, by adultery, she writes, but by Massachusetts
colonists'' overwhelming fears about the frontier war with the
Wabanaki Indians. Gathered by Hollinshead, former president of
Oxford University Press and publisher of the military history
journal MHQ, the best pieces in this uniformly perceptive
and provocative volume dispel popular myths and serve up familiar
events and heroes from fresh vantage points. According to Joseph
Ellis, George Washington spent most of his first term trying to
find a just solution to the Native American sovereignty problem and
bribed a Creek chief to achieve his goals. Geoffrey Ward wonders if
FDR''s physicians gave him the lowdown on his failing health before
he decided to run for a fourth term, and William Leuchtenburg
reimagines the tongue-lashing LBJ gave fellow "good ole boy" George
Wallace before the 1965 civil rights march from Selma to
Montgomery. Personal essays on the Scopes "monkey" trial, the day
Lincoln was shot and the flourishing Indian metropolis of Cahokia
in present-day Illinois circa 1030 round out this tantalizing
collection. Bw illus. Oct. 3
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Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out
of print or unavailable edition of this title.
關於作者:
Byron Hollinshead is president of American
Historical Publications, a producer of books in history for adults
and for children. Previously, he was president of American Heritage
Publishing Company and Oxford University Press, Inc. He was
publisher of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History
and Time Machine: American History for Kids. He is a former
president of National History Day and, currently, vice-chair of The
National Council for History Education. Hollinshead has been a
consultant to several PBS documentaries in history including, most
recently, Freedom: A History of US, a sixteen part series
from Kunhardt Productions. As an editor and publisher, Mr.
Hollinshead has worked with many of the authors in this anthology
on their previous books and articles.