Witness to the Revolution by Clara Bingham

Witness to the Revolution by Clara Bingham is full of first person accounts and primary source material about the school year from August 1969 to September 1970.  As Bingham explains, "the core of this book comes from 100 interviews I conducted between 2012 and 2015 with members of the Vietnam antiwar movement …. [Witness to the Revolution is the result of] editing tens of thousands of pages of transcripts and shaping them into a tightly woven chronological narrative." 

Bingham, a former Newsweek White House Correspondent, includes chapters on a variety of relevant topics like the Draft, Madison (WI), Ellsberg, My Lai and Kent State.  Her interviews include easily recognizable names (e.g., Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and Julius Lester), less known student activists and local police officers. I have been working with Modern America Social Studies classes on projects about key events in the sixties and early seventies so I was familiar with actions leading up to and occurring during this time, but I still found the stories in Witness to the Revolution to be fascinating. They added a personal note and details of which I was often unaware.  

By definition the majority of interviews were conducted with people on one side of the debate about Vietnam. Bingham acknowledges that Witness to the Revolution “is a selective history” covering a snapshot and would likely agree on the importance for our students of weighing and balancing perspectives since she “leaves readers to draw their own conclusions.” I know that our students will find this text to be a valuable source of information about civil disobedience, the people involved and the times themselves.  Witness to the Revolution received a starred review from Kirkus and we will have it on our shelves next fall.