Overview

American History Told By Contemporaries is a collection of Primary Sources from the American past, designed to give readers a wide variety of perspectives on issues and events that were important to the people who lived through them. The beauty of a Primary Source is not only that it represents an eyewitness view of events we can only read about, but that the person writing about their concern or experience doesn't know what the future holds. Too often, we imagine these events of American history as if they were inevitable. This is not how people experienced them as they were happening. This first volume contains 60 sources, from an account of Lief Erikson's journey to Vinland about 1000, to letters written by Eliza Lucas in 1741 and 1742. A second volume will present sources in the Revolutionary era; a third and a fourth will take it from there. I've been using over 200 sources in my US History 1 course, and I keep adding sources. So this will be a multi-volume set.