DOCUMENTS BRING YOU FACE-TO-FACE WITH THE PAST

From the almost limitless historical record, I chose documents that clearly and vividly express an important perspective about a major event or a widespread point of view during a certain historical era. I selected documents that are not only revealing but also often surprising, controversial, or troubling. My goal is to bring you face-to-face with the past through the eyes of the people who lived it.

Reading the American Past is designed to accompany The American Promise: A History of the United States. Each chapter in this volume parallels a chapter in The American Promise. The documents provide eyewitness accounts that broaden and deepen the textbook narrative. Chapter 16, for example, supplements the textbook discussion of Reconstruction with selections from five documents: a report on the attitudes of whites in the former Confederacy in the summer of 1865; the Mississippi Black Code; advertisements of former slaves seeking lost family members; a plantation owner’s journal entry about his first visit with his former slaves after they became free following the Civil War; and testimony of an African American Republican before the congressional committee investigating the Ku Klux Klan in 1871. Each selection is long enough to convey the central message of the author, but short enough to be read for the first time in ten minutes or so. In general, each chapter in this book contains five documents of roughly similar length.