I Wish I'd Been There
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3.9 • 7 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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. B&w illus.
