Awards

• Winner of 2014 AAUP Public and Secondary School Library Selection.

Overview

Things you can see and touch can bring to mind the time when the items were made and used. In Touching America's History, Meredith Mason Brown uses twenty objects to summon up major developments in America's history. The objects range in date from a Pequot stone axe head probably made before the Pequot War in 1637, to the western novel Dwight Eisenhower was reading while waiting for the weather to clear so that the Normandy Invasion could begin, and to a piece of a toilet bowl found in the bombed-out wreckage of Hitler's home in the Bavarian alps in 1945. Among the other historically evocative items are a Kentucky rifle carried by Col. John Floyd, killed by Indians in 1783; a letter from George Washington explaining why he will not be able to attend the Constitutional Convention; shavings from the scaffold on which John Brown was hanged; a pistol belonging to Gen. William Preston, in whose arms Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston bled to death after being shot at the Battle of Shiloh; and the records of a court-martial for the killing by an American officer of a Filipino captive during the Philippine War. Together, the objects call to mind nothing less than the birth, growth, and shaping of what is now America.

Full Product Details

9780253008336

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Reviews

A new and interesting take on moments in America's past. It's a page turner... with good writing and an appreciation that big events are often, maybe always, populated and constructed by people other than the prominent leaders. Walter Nugent, author of Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansion

Author Information

Meredith Mason Brown is author of Frontiersman: Daniel Boone and the Making of America.

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