AS I SAW IT: Women Who Lived the American Adventure

Taken from the letters and diaries of 40 women, these excerpts give an immediacy to key periods and events in American history. Some of the women--Abigail Adams, Clara Barton, Mother Jones--are well known; many others, far from legendary, nonetheless have keen insights to offer--on being an Indian captive, on the siege of Boston, on an 1850 Newfoundland-to-California sail, when butter was $1.50 a pound. Hawaiian Queen Liliukolani tells of her 1895 imprisonment and forced abdication; bobbin girl Lucy Larcom recalls life in the Lowell mills. Others include a Donner-Pass party survivor, one of the few who managed without eating human flesh; a Northern spy who passed as a black man behind Confederate lines; a pioneer doctor and former milliner, discussing her unlikely transition; and ""Dame Shirley"" Clappe in the Sierra goldfields, entertaining her sister with the story of her $3.25 strike: ""I wet my feet, tore my dress, spoilt a pair of new gloves, nearly froze my fingers, got an awful headache, took cold and lost a valuable breastpin, in this my labor of love."" Highly diverting and well-balanced, from colonial start to 1894 Jewish immigrant finish.