David Colbert - Eyewitness to America

Napoleon Bonaparte announces from his bathtub that he will sell Louisiana to the Americans… Jack London surveys the rubble of the San Francisco earthquake and fire.. Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on the bus,,, Andy Warhol meets Valadimir Horotitz at Studio 54…

These people are among the hundred we find in the extraordinary collection of documentary narrative, each eyewitness account putting the reader at the center of a telling moment in American history. From five hundred years of diaries and memoirs, letter and reportage, David Colbert has pieced together a fascinating montage of our nation that offers new perspective on familiar and not so familiar events. From Babe Ruth to Beatlemania, from the Alamo to the atom bomb, from the Boston Tea Party to the L.A. riots, here is a rich love of voices and events that is fresh, urgent, immediate – and immensely pleasurable to read.