Eyewitness to History, by John Carey.
New York: Avon Books, 1987.
$15.95 - 752 pages.

A Mountain Song, by Bruce Carden.
Waynesville: Professional Press, 2001.

Too often the word “history” conjures up memories of textbooks big as doorstops, litanies of dates to be memorized, dry lectures regarding Supreme Court cases, treaties, and Congressional legislation. History frequently ranks near the bottom of the heap of high school subjects; one poll several years ago had history ranked at the very bottom, even beaten out by keyboarding and remedial math.

This is unfortunate, for as some adult readers will attest, history is actually a fascinating subject. Today there are many wonderful historians and biographers - William Manchester, Stephen Ambrose, and Antonia Frasier come to mind - who make the past sparkle and shine before our eyes.

One particular kind of history that can bring the past to life are eyewitness accounts of events. In the hands of a competent writer, such accounts may recreate a time or a place so palpably real that readers often feel as if they can reach out and touch it.

One of the best of these books is John Carey’s Eyewitness to History. Published in 1987 but still in print, this compilation of events is taken from memoirs, letters, books, and newspapers. Although the timeline of the book runs from ancient times to the present, the bulk of the documents address events from the eighteenth century onward. Carey, who was Merton Professor of English at Oxford University, has selected only those accounts that are most vividly written.

Many of Carey’s selections were written by famous authors or politicians - Victor Hugo, Charlotte Bronte, Ernest Hemingway, Queen Victoria - while others are the work of people unfamiliar to most of us. Many of these accounts may impress the reader as being violent or full of war; it does indeed seem as if Carey has indulged a somewhat morbid nature in his collection of battles, mayhem, and executions. Yet history’s many turning points are frequently made up of just such things, and they are also the items that most interest readers. In Eyewitness to History, Carey gives us accounts of the Charge of the Light Brigade, imprisonment in the Black Hole of Calcutta, the shooting of Czar Nicholas and his family, the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, Scott’s Expedition to the South Pole, and literally hundreds of other events.

Here, for example, is part of Vincent Lundari’s account of the first manned flight in England in 1784. Describing an incident where his balloon rose over 600 feet, he wrote:

“I became very cold and found it necessary to take a few glasses of wine. I likewise ate the leg of a chicken, but my bread and other provisions had been rendered useless by being mixed with the sand, which I carried as ballast ... I saw the streets as lines, all animated with beings, whom I knew to be men and women, but which I should otherwise have had a difficulty in describing. It was an enormous bee-hive, but the industry of it was suspended. All the moving mass seemed to have no object but myself ...”

It is the details of this flight - the taking of a few glasses of wine, for instance, or the author’s near inability to describe the strangeness of people when seen from a great heighth - that create in the reader an indelible impression from a moment in the past.

A Mountain Song
On a local level, A Mountain Song (Professional Press, 2000) is Bruce Carden’s own eyewitness account of life in Sylva and Waynesville since the Depression. Carden, who grew up in Sylva, writes both amusingly and movingly of life in the 1930s and 1940s in that town; his stories regarding rural and small-town life - hog killing, schooling, entertainment - reveal his love for this land and its people.

After college and a stint in the United States Air Force, Carden eventually moved to Waynesville, where he worked in the Haywood County public schools for more than 30 years. His stories from this time of his life are taken from his experiences in the classroom, from the First Baptist Church, and from the people he has met in the region. Carden’s short essays give us quick glimpses into mountain life and the importance of family and character.

A Mountain Song is available in local bookstores or may be ordered from: Bruce Carden, 226 Thomas Park, Waynesville, N.C., 28786.

(Jeff Minick owns Saints and Scholars bookstore on Main Street in Waynesville.)

 

Back to Top

The Smoky Mountain News