While Alexis de Tocqueville's, Democracy in America may remain one of the most important and compelling commentaries on the American condition, the American Memory project at the Library of Congress has compiled this wonderful collection of 253 published narratives by Americans and foreign visitors from the period of 1750 to 1920 for the convenience of the Web-browsing public. The criteria used to determine which narratives would be included in the collection were that the work had to be primarily in the first person, that it was free of copyright restrictions, and that it was part of the Library of Congress's General Collections. Along with familiar works by Charles Dickens, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper, the collection includes works by lesser known persons, such as Josiah Gregg's, The Journal of a Santa Fe trader, 1831-1839 and Captain Basil Hall's, Travels in North America, in the years 1827 and 1828.