The author of Eyewitness to America (named "the best Americana collection on my shelf" by Charles Kuralt) now focuses his you-are-there lens on lower Manhattan's legendary lane, vividly tracing Wall Street's explosive roller-coaster ride from the 1600s to the twenty-first century.

Drawing on diaries, private letters, memoirs, and reportage, David Colbert's acclaimed Eyewitness books offer extraordinary first hand views of history's pivotal moments. Eyewitness to Wall Street's combination of remarkable perspectives and a subject of exceptional current interest results in the richest and most illuminating Eyewitness book yet.

From our first IPO—the European fund-raising that launched America's colonization—through today's mass obssession with the Dow and Nasdaq, Eyewitness to Wall Street brims with accounts form people who saw it happen—poets and speculators, patriots and criminals, politicians and reporters—including Daniel Defoe, Mark Twain, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Warren Buffet, and Michael Lewis. It reveals how Wall Street traders saved the Continental Army from bankruptcy and helped financed the Union during the Civil War; how Americans were suckered by the bull market of early 1929 and struggled through the rebuilding of modern Wall Street. More than half the book is devoted to the contemporary era, defined by the "greed is good" 1980s, the bull market 1990s, and the dot-com millionaires and inflated markets of the twenty-first century.

Unlike narrative histories, Eyewitness to Wall Street provides human insight through the words of those who experienced the manias, panics, and crashes