We All Got History: The Memory Books of Amos Webber, Salvatore, Nick. Published by New York: Times Books, 1996. 8vo up to 9½” tall., 443pp; illustrated, bibliography, index. Quarter black cloth over red boards. Volume is in fine condition and housed in a jacket with very light shelf wear. Winner of The Bancroft Prize.
Lost for over a hundred years until their rediscovery by Nick Salvatore, Amos Webber’s “Thermometer Books” recorded six decades of the daily experiences of a black freeman in nineteenth-century Philadelphia and Worcester, Massachusetts. These diaries form the basis for Salvatore’s vital portrait of an everyday hero who struggled unrelentingly for his people in a land that still considered blacks to be less than human. In We All Got History, we see Webber working as a janitor; rescuing fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad; marching triumphantly into Richmond with the Fifth Massachusetts Cavalry; and active in the religious and fraternal organizations that became the cement of the African American community.
