We all got history

Description

One chilly December evening in the city of Philadelphia, a twenty-eight-year-old man named Amos Webber opened up a notebook and began to keep a chronicle. He wrote about the weather and about politics, about friends and about family, and he wrote about what it was like to be a black American in a land that still considered those of his skin color to be less than human. The year was 1854. Webber was active in the Underground Railroad, fought in the Civil War, was a leader in the African-American fraternal movement, and was a political activist who never stopped fighting for justice and equality. His was the life of many African-Americans in the nineteenth century, of church and family, of friends and patriotism, of racism, and of pride. Using Webber's own chronicle as its heart, Nick Salvatore's book surrounds Amos's words with an astonishing wealth of research and richness of character and description. We meet escaped slaves and their vengeful masters, Civil War generals and infantrymen, ministers and musicians, husbands and wives, politicians and criminals, those who welcomed change and those who fought it. We travel to nineteenth-century Philadelphia, a bustling port city of a quarter million residents, where Amos Webber worked as a servant and handyman; to Worcester, Massachusetts, a burgeoning industrial town, where Webber would find his calling as a community leader; to the Civil War South, as Webber's service as a Union soldier took him from battlefields and prison camps to the conquered cities of Richmond and Petersburg and even into Texas. A vibrant African-American culture - one hidden from most Americans at the time and from history books since - is revealed as never before through Webber's own words and Salvatore's spectacular integration of letters, newspaper accounts, primary documents, and a host of other sources. No matter how rich you imagined the African American legacy in this country, this book will astound you. We All Got History will profoundly change the way you think about American history; reading it is like returning to the home you grew up in and discovering a room you never knew existed. Through Amos Webber's life we see not only the story of one man, but the story of our nation - black and white - as it struggles to add meaning to America's opening verse: that all men are created equal. And by stepping back into Amos Webber's world we can begin to step forward in our own, armed with a new sense of what it means to be American, what it means to fight for justice, and what it means to be free.

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