We Americans [antikvár]

PicturinaOurPastI o catch hold of and encompass in wordsto describe exactlythe life of a single people, much less of humanity, would appear impossible," grumbled Leo Tol-stoy in War and Peace more than a century ago. Fortunately, to our great en-richment, historians have kept trying. Their latest triumph is the volume in your hands the product of 20 distinguished authors, among them recipients of the prestigious Bancroft, Parkman, and Pulitzer awards for history. Despite Count Tolstoy's gloomy pronouncement, they have managed superbly "to catch hold of and encompass in words" the life of this vastly varied, marvelously mingled people we call Americans.But gifted writing alone could not make We Americans what it is. As you leaf its richly illustrated pages you will be struck by the realization that the United States is the world's most photographed country; fully two-thirds of our national adventure has been chronicled on film and tucked away in archives across the country.The earliest daguerreotype practitioners committed the image of a people to a sen-sitized copper plate and found they had captured their character, too. The camera, we know now, can be more precise than words, and just as powerful. Portraitist Ma-thew B. Brady undertook to record the Civil War by sending teams of photographers to almost every battlefield. "Let him who wishes to know what war is look at this series of illustrations," wrote Olivér Wendell Holmes of Brady's work. By contrast, glancé at the "Little Lord Fauntleroy" in the following "series of illustrations" and wonder at a fad that put a nation's boys in velvet suits and curls. Or turn to the photograph of a migrant-worker mother and find a full textbook on the despair that stalked America during the Great Depression of the '30'sand the grit that pulled its people through."History is the essence of innumerable biographies," wrote Thomas Carlyle. People have always been the true stuff of history. Yet the greatest events and struggles often are shaped by the nameless ones. A score of Africans forgottén nowbrought to Jamestown in 1619 foreshadowed momentous tides across this land: a vast, fore-doomed plantation economy; a tragic fratricidal war; a long, painful groping toward equality and dignity; racial resentments that still smolder. In one of those oddly inter-weaving currents of history, another ship in 1619 delivered to Jamestown somé 90 "young maids to make wives" and another American struggle for parity was ordained. That battle continues as a campaign for an Equal Rights Amendment.We Americans include history-makers whose names survive, but whose impact has been dimmed by time. Sámuel Slater, for example. In 1789 (continued on page 20)Jacob Byerly in 1842 opened a gallery as one of America's first daguerreotypists. Hardly a decade later 10,000 others were producing the same "remarkable objects of curiosity and admiration." Thus sprouted the nation's fasci-nation with the camera and the rich harvest arrayed on these pages.The strong mothers puliing themfrom a dark sea, a great prairie, a long mountain The strong menkeep coming on. Carl Sandburg, Upstream