USNews.com: Eyewitness to History

Illustration: Rod Little for USN&WR

THE PROJECT

"The instinct to tell what we have seen," observes curator Stacey Bredhoff of the National Archives, "is as old as humanity." Thomas Jefferson recounts the storming of the Bastille with the ambition of a cub reporter; Lady Bird John son confesses that witnessing the Kennedy assassination was simply "too great a thing to have alone."

Whatever the reasons for it, it is to this impulse to record that we owe "Eyewitness: American Originals From the National Archives," an exhibit running now until next January in Washington, D.C.at the Lawrence F. O'Brien Gallery of the National Archives, and scheduled to travel later around the country. In the pages that follow are selections from that exhibit: letters, transcripts, and diaries — from Americans famous and not — that revive crucial moments in his tory with an intensity and intimacy that no secondary source can match. As always when savoring musty documents, one mourns the loss of the personal note, the fountain pen, even the manual typewriter. The observations are thoughtful, the language elegant and precise. Yet new technologies, however unromantic, bring new possibilities. With E-mail, camera phones, and instant-message programs, more Americans now have the tools to tell their stories.

For better or worse, they are immediate, spontaneous, unfiltered — just the way the first recordings of history should be.