REFERENCE BOOK–OUR NATION’S ARCHIVE: THE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES IN DOCUMENTS, Edited by Erik Bruun & Jay Crosby, Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, Inc., $29.98.
Editors Erik Bruun and Jay Crosby have compiled an 886-page, comprehensive anthology of documents from United States history. The material in this excellent resource guide features more than 500 speeches, letters, and court cases dating from a pre-Columbian Cherokee creation myth to contemporary foreign policy. Documents include the transcript of a Salem witch trial, Charles Lindbergh’s description of his first transatlantic flight, the recollections of a GI on Omaha Beach, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”