The New York Times reviews a new exhibit at the National Archives in Washington. An excerpt:
Ms. Bredhoff has avoided letting this exhibition settle into chronological or thematic or political predictability. Thomas Jefferson’s letter to John Jay, United States Secretary of Foreign Affairs, reporting on the storming of the Bastille in Paris in 1789 — with its description of royalty consumed by rumor, and street mobs consumed by passions — is followed by the testimony of a Rochester election official who describes Susan B. Anthony demanding that she be registered to vote in 1872.
A letter from George Washington in 1775, worrying that the British might have deliberately sent smallpox-infected carriers into the ranks of American troops, is not far from where the 1937 voice of the radio broadcaster Herb Morrison can be heard, sounding as fiery, hysterical and consumed as the gas explosion he describes, which was engulfing the Hindenburg.
Events take on a different character, depending on how they are depicted. Lincoln’s assassination is seen through the eyes of his family physician, Dr. Robert King Stone, who finds a bullet hole on the back left side of the head, a hole “into which I carried immediately my finger.”