DOCUMENTS AS HISTORICAL SNAPSHOTS

These flaws of memory might cause us to shrug wearily and conclude that it is impossible to determine what happened. But documents make it possible to learn a great deal — although not every last thing — about what really happened. Because documents are created by humans, they are subject to all the frailties of memory, with one vital exception: Documents do not change. Unlike memory, documents freeze words at a moment in time. Ideas, perceptions, emotions, and assumptions expressed in a document allow us to learn now about what happened then. In effect, documents are a bridge from the present to the past. They allow us to cross over and to discover how we got from there to here.

Today you can stand where the audience stood in 1863 to listen to Abraham Lincoln’s famous speech at the dedication of the cemetery for the Union soldiers killed at the battle of Gettysburg. Of course you can’t hear Lincoln’s voice, but you can read his words because the Gettysburg Address exists as a historical document; you can literally read this portion of the American past. The address transports the reader back to that crisp November day almost a century and a half ago, the outcome of the war very much in doubt, when the president and commander in chief of more than a million men in blue uniforms explained in a few words his view of the meaning of the war for the nation and the world. The address captured Lincoln’s thoughts at that moment and preserved them, much like a historical snapshot. All documents have this property of stopping time, of indelibly recording somebody’s views at a specific moment in the past.

The documents in Reading the American Past allow you to travel back in time without getting up from your chair. You can accompany a slave owner as he visits his former slaves for the first time after the Civil War and emancipation. You can listen to a young woman describe her life on the Great Plains frontier to her relatives back East. You can read the letters of soldiers during World War II who recount their part in the global maelstrom. You can witness the confession of the self-professed mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. These and the many other documents in this book bring the past alive in the words of the people who lived it.