title: Witnessing America: The Library of Congress Book of First-Hand Accounts of Public Life
author: Noel Rae
description: This extraordinary, vibrant compendium of the American experience stitches together hundreds of first-person accounts by ordinary as well as famous individuals. Here is Mark Twain on trying to chew tobacco at age seven under peer pressure, Thoreau on a shipwreck, W.E.B. Du Bois on teaching in rural Tennessee, Benjamin Franklin on the passions of youth, Louisa May Alcott on making ends meet, Dr. Benjamin Rush on treating a yellow fever epidemic, Plymouth, Mass., Governor William Bradford on the 1620 crossing of the Mayflower, along with testaments by Emma Goldman, Richard Henry Dana, Dorothea Dix. One hundred illustrations drawn from the Library of Congress?posters, lithographs, ads, rare photographs, broadsides?feature Jacob Riis's gritty portraits of Manhattan's Lower East Side, a McGuffey's Eclectic Primer, E.S. Curtis's photograph of a Native American wedding. Chapters cover immigrant life, schools, courtship, love and marriage, work, households, eating and drinking, enduring hard times, religion, crime, illness and death, with accounts that take us inside slave ships, sweatshops, insane asylums, Shaker communities, Pueblo Indian villages, frontier trading posts, a Ku Klux Klan cell, a funeral in a California gold-mining camp. A useful reference and a great book for browsing. Rae is former executive director of Reader's Digest Condensed Books; Billington is Librarian of Congress. 50,000 first printing; $50,000 ad/promo. <BR>Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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  Copyright © 2019 Home Box Office, Inc.
  
  
  Text by Billy Kimball and David Mandel
  
  
  Jacket © 2019 Abrams
  
  
  Cover image courtesy of HBO
  
  
  This is a work of fiction. All of the individuals and characters in this book
  are fictitious. Any similarities that characters discussed in this book bear
  to individuals living or dead, are purely coincidental.
  
  
  Published in 2019 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved.
  No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
  transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying,
  recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
  
  
  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019931287
  
  
  ISBN: 978-1-4197-3353-6
  
  
  eISBN: 978-1-68335-411-6
  
  
  Abrams books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for
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