
Touching America's History
From the Pequot War Through WWII
کتاب های مرتبط
- اطلاعات
- نقد و بررسی
- دیدگاه کاربران
نقد و بررسی

May 1, 2013
Brown (Frontiersman: Daniel Boone and the Making of America) draws upon his family's more than 300 years in the United States and the heirlooms he has accrued to show how general readers, museum curators, and docents can learn history through objects. The approximately 20 sets of "touchstones" from which Brown draws stories and larger lessons include 17th-century Pequot Indian stone implements; an 18th-century Kentucky rifle and compass; a 1787 George Washington letter relating to his attendance at the Constitutional Convention; shavings said to be from the scaffold on which John Brown (not an ancestor) was hanged; Civil War border-state diaries; records of a court martial of great-uncle Preston Brown for the manslaughter of a Filipino captive, whose commutation by Teddy Roosevelt enabled his later distinguished service in World War I; the novel Gen. Eisenhower read while waiting for the weather to clear for the Normandy invasion; and a piece of shattered toilet retrieved by the author's godfather from Hitler's hideout. Quotidian materials such as these can become the artifacts from which museum collections are made. VERDICT Clearly written, buttressed by maps and portraits, Brown's book regales while showing the objectivity and nuance of a historian. The tales make distinctive what to professional practitioners are familiar yet intriguing accounts primarily of America's military and war-related past.--Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Lib. of Congress, Washington, DC
Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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