'Nothing can be believed but what one sees, or has from an eye witness.' - Thomas Jefferson, Paris, July 19, 1789. Thomas Jefferson's report on the violence in the streets of Paris at the unfolding of the French Revolution; explorer John C. Fremont's descriptions of the vast western landscapes he saw in 1843; Lady Bird Johnson's diary account of President Kennedy's assassination - these are among the twenty-two eyewitness accounts presented in this major new book chronicling some of the most dramatic moments in history. Gripping and emotional, they capture the exuberance, grief, joy, panic, or chaos that characterized the events. Many of the items, never before published, offer a fresh and surprising perspective on familiar events. George Washington, John Adams, and other towering figures, recount events seminal to United States' history which are featured alongside accounts left by those whose names escaped the history books.
John Boston, who fled slavery during the Civil War and reported with jubilation to his wife that he found freedom; Robert King Stone, President Abraham Lincoln's family physician, who testified on the condition and death of the President after he was shot in April 1865; and Harold Porter, a U.S. soldier who was with the first medical unit to enter the Dachau concentration camp after its liberation at the end of World War II and struggled to describe the unspeakable things that he saw there.