We All Got History: the memory books of Amos Webber

The Story

For six decades, between 1854 and 1904, Amos Webber, a black freeman living in Philadelphia and Worcester, Massachusetts, recorded his daily experience in diaries that he called 'Thermometer Books'. In 1985, the Bancroft Prize-winning historian Nick Salvatore discovered them in a Harvard library. Now he has woven Webber's diaries and other period sources into a landmark biography of an ordinary man pursuing a rich and independent life even as he shrewdly observed the society that had banished black people to the margins of history.In We All Got History, we have the record of an ordinary individual participating in the critical events of his time -- including rescuing slaves on the Underground Railroad; fighting with a black regiment in the Civil War; and taking part in the fraternal organizations that were the cement of the African American community.