I've no idea if this is too slight a thing to merit inclusion in this thread, but I've always found it delightful. Theodore Roosevelt, who would later distinguish himself as one of the foremost statesmen of his time, kept a sporadic journal in his youth. This amazing document included his extensive impressions of the grand European tour conducted by his family when he was ten years old, and there are scores of fascinating (and often hilarious) passages in which the young ruffian finds himself confronted with the culture of the Old World.

By the time the Roosevelts reached Rome, Teedy (as he was then commonly called) had turned 11. His time in the Eternal City was not the most exciting to him, at first:

Dec 22d 1868, Rome: Papa made us stay in bed till 7 which is verry tiresome as we were awake at 6. We dressed and now instead of the Roman sun the Roman rain is pouring in on the windows and from all I can see of Rome it has no pavements is verry uneven and houses are old, ugly dirty and awkward. In fact entirely different from the romantic city I had expected.

Being stuck inside produces its own adventures, however:

Dec 23, Rome 1869: Bamie and we stayed in in the early morning... We put up Christmas presents. We then played. I had the bath-tub and viel and they had two bellows and we fought. Then they two had towels and I had bath-tub and towels and I attacked and beat them. Read, dinner.

Dec. 24th Rome 1869: ...Conie Ellie and I played in bed in the morning and then all except Bamie and we 3 went out. Tomorrow is Christmas!!!! hip! hip! hurrah!!!! ... We made the trunks, sofas, chairs, and table in a row and then we two boys were donkey and with Conie on our backs we pretended we were crossing a pass.

Then Conie went in a room and Ellie and I stuffed our pockets with pieces of bread. We went round the house throwing bread at each other and letting it drop down stairs and laughing at evvery thing anything and nothing and then we came in one of the rooms found a lemon and went to the lardor where we got some sugar and made some lemonade. We 2 boys drunk it with much relish.

We then had lunch and then we 3 went out in the hall and threw some bread on another floor and then a man picked them up and looked fierce at us. We were frightened and did not go out anymor. We hung up Mamas stockings to a table.

Many more reminiscences of Christmas and so on continue, but I'm more interested in what happens later. The family eventually undertakes a variety of cultural and political visits, including an audience (to Teedy quite tedious and unremarkable) with Pope Pius IX. His encounters with this pontiff would not end there, however:

Jan. 31st, Rome, 1870: I went to Dickeys house and then we met Ellie on the Pinchen. We met some others and play fox and geese and bull and a kind of soildiers. Ate ice and pelted a soildier with it. Dinner. Went out and played with a lot of Dickeys. We saw the Pope and we walked along and he extended his hand to me and I kissed it!! hem!! hem!!

I'm not sure why this chance encounter between Pontiff and future President pleases me so, but it does. For all of his apparent sarcasm about the event, we learn from his sister's account of the meeting in her own memoirs that Teedy was actually quite polite in his run-in with Pius IX, kneeling solemnly to receive the papal blessing in spite of his own Dutch Reformed background.

There aren't too many ancient Greco-Roman eyewitness accounts: the most important would be Pausanias; there's also bits of Thucydides, Xenophon, Caesar, Cicero, Pliny the Younger, and others; but most information is third-hand at best.

Perhaps it's better to pick out one of my favourite texts, which claims to be a first-person eyewitness account but is nothing of the sort. The Journal of Diktys of Crete claims in its prefatory material to be a diary of the Trojan War, written by a soldier in the Cretan contingent. In reality it was written sometime between 66 CE and ca. 150. It's a heavily revisionist version of the story: the gods do not appear (though their temples do), many elements get rationalised, and overall it takes the traditional legendary material and re-writes it to give it a somewhat romanticised flavour. Most people who work on the ancient Greek novel wouldn't grant it a position in that genre, as it takes the job of providing verisimilitude very seriously. But it certainly does contain some romance elements: the abortive romance of Achilles and Polyxena; various dreams; the first meeting of Paris and Helen in a garden at Sparta; the evil plotting of Odysseus against Palamedes; and the bruality of Paris' and Deiphobos' murder of Achilles in a temple sanctuary at night when he thought he was going to be canoodling with Polyxena.

As an illustration of how much it changes the traditional material, here's one report of Diktys' account of Odysseus' encounters with the "Cyclops" (corresponding to section 6.5 of the Latin Dictys; source of this report: John Malalas Chronographia 5.17, trans. Jeffreys et al. p. 60):

...after a very long and stormy voyage [Odysseus] reached the island known as Sikila, but now known as Sicily. This island was very large, and was divided among three large, strong brothers who shared the same opinions: I mean Kyklops, Antiphantes, and Polyphemos, the sons born to Sikanos, emperor of that island. These three brothers were harsh men who never received strangers but instead killed them. Odysseus put in with his ships and his army to the part which belonged to Antiphantes and joined battle with him and his army who were known as Laistrygones. They killed quite a few from Odysseus' army.

He took his ships and sailed in flight from there to another part of the island, which belonged to Kyklops, where there are the mountains called Kyklopaian. On learning this, Kyklops attacked him with his forces. He was large in body and hideous. Falling upon Odysseus unexpectedly as he was putting into the land which belonged to him, Kyklops cut down many of his men. ...

And so on. After this, Odysseus goes on to the land owned by Polyphemos, who is affected by Odysseus' sufferings and offers him hospitality. Unfortunately, one of his men falls in love with Polyphemos' daughter and absconds with her when they depart; Polyphemos sends a fleet after them and fetches her back.

For reference, in the traditional legendary version, Polyphemos is the name of a Kyklops, a monster with one eye; Antiphates is the king of a race of giants called the Laistrygones, and unrelated to Polyphemos.

The most delightful thing about this text is its pseudepigraphic character. The opening preface gives an account of how Diktys' journal was found after an earthquake in Crete opened up his tomb in 66 CE; the text was found written in "Phoenician" characters, and promptly sent off to the emperor Nero, who recognised its importance and commanded that it be translated into Greek and published. In fact the most complete surviving version of the work is in Latin, and a prefatory letter in some manuscripts of the Latin version tells us how Lucius Septimius translated it from Greek.

So we get a beautiful pseudepigraphic frame story to add to the story's verisimilitude. This is picked up in section 5.15 (in the Latin version) where Diktys signs off as follows (trans. Frazer):

I, Dictys of Cnossos, the companion of Idomeneus, have written this account in the language (how many there are!) I best understand, using the Phoenician alphabet bequeathed to us by Cadmus and Danaus. No one should marvel that many different languages are spoken on this one island of mine, for such is the case all over Greece. Everything I have written about the war between the Greeks and the barbarians, in which I took a very active part, is based on first-hand knowledge.

The trouble is that this verisimilitude, which was certainly only meant as a clever frame story when the text was first published, caused it to be taken quite seriously in later centuries by people who were much more ready to believe a writer who came across as being as honest and frank as Diktys is. Both in the Latin west and the Greek east, Dictys/Diktys came to be trusted as the most authentic account of the Trojan War: not as literary as Homer, Euripides, or Vergil, but more trustworthy. In the west his influence was diluted by the even more prominent Dares of Phrygia, another supposed eyewitness account: the late-12th century poetic Troy Romance by Benoît de St Maure was based mostly on Dares, but also drew on Dictys for later parts of the war. Nearly all of the Troy matter in the western tradition from then on was derived from Benoît, including Boccaccio and Chaucer. In the Greek world, Diktys' preeminence was unchallenged, and he was treated as the only authentic account of the war by Byzantine historians (John Malalas, John of Antioch, Kedrenos), scholars (Isaac Porphyrogennetos, John Tzetzes), and poets (Konstantinos Manasses), with greater authority than Homer or Euripides.

The veracity of the Latin Dictys only started to be consistently doubted starting in the 1700s. By the 19th century it had become obvious that the text was pseudepigraphic, but some elements were still up for debate:

1. whether there had ever existed a Greek version, and whether the letter written by the Latin translator, Lucius Septimius, was just part of the frame story;
2. whether the text had in fact been found written in "Phoenician" letters; and
3. if there was a Greek original, whether that was associated with the name "Dictys", since one Byzantine witness (Malalas) cites another source, Sisyphos of Kos, for parts of his account, and they are nearly identical to material in the Latin Dictys.

The first of these questions was finally settled in 1907 by the publication of the first Greek papyrus of the original text, which showed that Septimius didn't invent the whole thing himself. The third question had to wait until 2009, when another Greek papyrus was found that contained Diktys' "signature", quoted above. The original Greek text there reads:

And I wrote up this account, Diktys of Knossos, following Idomeneus [. . .] so far as was possible for me, using the letters of Kadmos and Danaos. For not all the Greeks use a single language, and neither do all the barbarians, but it is mixed. And no one should judge this surprising, since even we in Crete do not all use the same language. The things that happened to the Greeks and the barbarians that I have written, I saw all of them myself.

Question 2 has continued to be the object of some uncertainty in some quarters even within the last decade, but it's become pretty clear recently that "Phoenician" here actually refers to the early form of the Greek alphabet: the Greeks routinely called archaic forms of the alphabet "Phoenician" to (a) distinguish it from contemporary styles, and (b) to refer to its legendary origin (supposedly imported from Phoenicia by Kadmos).

So the answers to the three questions are: yes, no, and yes. But it took until the 21st century to sort that out.

The other striking thing about Diktys is just how far-reaching the influence of this text is. The story of Troilus and Cressida/Criseyde that we get in Chaucer and Shakespeare is ultimately derived from the Dares-Dictys tradition; but it goes beyond that. One early movie on the Trojan War, La caduta di Troia (1911), seems to take elements from Dictys, notably in the garden scene where Paris and Helen fall for each other. And the most recent one too, Wolfgang Petersen's Troy (2004), borrows from the Latin Dictys: the romance between Achilles and Briseis, the Trojan princess/priestess that he captures from the temple of Apollo outside Troy, is a reworking on Dictys' romance between Achilles and Polyxena, a Trojan princess and priestess of Athena and Apollo, and the romance is based around the shrine of Thymbraean Apollo outside Troy. None of these elements are in the traditional versions of the legend. I find it remarkable that a text that is so poorly known has had such a wide and long-lasting influence: it's arguably had more influence on the legend of the Trojan War than any other text ever, including Homer, and yet it is barely known nowadays.

Oral history is something near and dear to my heart. As someone who studies very recent history I use oral history far more often than some of my colleagues. Although there are certainly limits to the usefulness of oral history, it is invaluable for its ability to provide emotional context. As Historians, we don't often give feelings the respect they deserve in regards to historical discourse. Feelings, of course, are ephemeral and quickly lost to the sands of time. Going back and looking at first person accounts is so helpful for providing that emotional context. The historian can look back with 20/20 vision and have a good understanding of everything that was going on, obscuring how people actually felt/believed/acted in the moment.
One of the most fantastic pieces of oral history is the ACT UP Oral History Project. Transcripts of dozens of interviews with surviving members of ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power - a direct action AIDS activist group active in the late eighties and nineties) are available online here

These interviews do a great job of getting at the sense of urgency and immediacy that was a central part of ACT UP. In retrospect, it's easy to forget how immediate and urgent things were. Here's a good quote from ACT UP member Dudley Saunders that illustrates the personal urgency of gay men with AIDS:

"It was an emergency. I mean it was a matter - I wonder if I can stay alive? I wonder if I can keep [a friend] from going blind? Right this second, because he's going blind right now; he's dying right now; he's got PCP (Pneumocystis pneumonia) right now, and I know how to stop it, and I got to get something right now and I'm going to do whatever the fuck it takes right now."

This does such a good job of showing the emotional context of ACT UP and how that influenced how people acted. Saunders really gets and the urgency of AIDS (he's dying right now) and the agency ACT UP members felt they had (I know how to stop it.) The synergy of those forces was something really central to ACT UP. That's one of the great things about oral history, it can really get the emotionally core of what was happening.

I would just like to plug a favourite radio show/podcast of mine:

'Witness' from BBC world service.

The episodes are usually between 5 and 15 minutes long and each one recounts significant historical events from first person perspectives. Sometimes they will use written accounts, sometimes studio interviews and sometimes archive recordings. It mainly focuses on very modern history, events that have made the news headlines in the last 100 years, for which eye witnesses are still around, but they do sometimes look at earlier topics where written first hand evidence exists.

Napalm. Albeit used plenty of times since the end of WWII, including WWII itself, it is in the Vietnam War in which the use of napalm has captured the popular memory of its use. Whether it's the harrowing image of the nude South Vietnamese girl Kim Phuc running away from her village that was just bombed by the VNAF or by Lt. Kilgore's infamous line in Apocalypse Now, napalm has become one of the enduring images and controversies of the Vietnam War.

Yet, the first time it was used in Vietnam was not by the South Vietnamese or the Americans.

In 1950, the French Indochina War (1946-1954) had turned international. After years of being nothing but a localized conflict of decolonization, it became a part of a larger conflict. The Cold War had kicked in properly and with support granted to the Viet Minh by the newly created People's Republic of China, the United States in return began to provide material and financial support to France to wage a war that had suddenly turned from being a colonial war (something it still was, no matter the rhetoric coming from France) to becoming a war against communism. For France, this meant increased firepowers, new uniforms and modern weapons. Some Foreign Legionnaires at this time had even resorted to fighting with WWI-vintage Lebel rifles in lack of modern weaponry. For the Viet Minh, however, this meant much more than just weapons. It meant that the borderline ragtag guerrilla army could start becoming more professional and well-trained. With Chinese assistance, entire divisions were organized, trained and equipped. Their first test came in September 1950 when Dong Khe was assaulted and promptly fell. Seeing the situation as untenable, the nearby outpost of Cao Bang was told to leave the outpost and rendezvous with a rescue force coming up from That Khe. Both forces were constantly ambushed by the Viet Minh on the way there and when the survivors from these constant ambushes managed to link up, they only managed to enter one final ambush which almost annihilated the two columns. Just 600 men returned to French lines after dividing themselves into smaller groups. Around 4800 men died trying to link up with the other force and the battle, which took place on Route Coloniale 4 and received its name from that very road, and which was dubbed bien gioi (Border Campaign) by the Viet Minh, was a disaster to the French. The time had come to strike the Red River delta to open the road to Hanoi and gain control over Tonkin (North Vietnam). There were a few problems in the way of the Viet Minh though: not only had the French received a new commander in Jean De Lattre Tassigny, a man whose military capabilities were extraordinarily competent and who was a veteran of both WWI and WWII, but Vo Nguyen Giap had become a bit too confident after the Border Campaign. Giap thought that the time had come to enter the third, conventional stage of Mao's guerrilla theory and that the Viet Minh was ready to take on the French in the open.

He was about to make a huge mistake.

The first battle in this campaign took place at Vinh Yen. The plan was straight forward: break through the defenses and then exploit the gap to move behind the French defenses (the De Lattre Line) to Hanoi. When the battle began on January 13 1951, it seemed that Vinh Yen was going to fall to Viet Minh and that Hanoi was going to be theirs. They just hadn't counted on De Lattre. Despite sending in reinforcements in the form of a groupe mobile (a concept that he himself had introduced to the war), he could see in his spotter plane that the situation was becoming desperate for the French. That's when he scrambled every available aircraft and sent it to bomb the Viet Minh positions around Vinh Yen with napalm to break their attack.

A Viet Minh officer by the name Ngo Van Chieu, witnessed one of these bombardments and later wrote in his diary (later published in France as Journal d'un combattant Viet-Minh):

"All of a sudden a sound can be heard in the sky and strange birds appear, getting larger and larger. Airplanes. I order my men to take cover from the bombs and machine-gun bullets. But the planes dive upon us without firing their guns. However, all of a sudden, hell opens in front of my eyes. Hell comes in the form of large egg shaped containers, dropping from the first plane, followed by other eggs from the second and third plane. Immense sheets of flames, extending over hundreds of meters, it seems, strike terror in the rank of my soldiers. This is napalm, the fire that falls from the skies.

Another plane swoops down behind us and again drops a napalm bomb. The bomb falls closely behind us and I feel its fiery breath touching my whole body. The men are now fleeing in all directions and I cannot hold them back. There is no way of holding out under this torrent of fire that flows in all directions and burns everything in its passage. On all sides, flames surround us now. In addition, French artillery and mortars now have our range and transform into a fiery tomb what had been, ten minutes ago, a quiet part of the forest."

De Lattre's decision proves to be decisive and the attack on Vinh Yen is beaten back. While Giap would try twice to break into the Red River delta, he fails spectacularly and for the rest of 1951 reverts back to guerrilla warfare having learned his lesson about entering a conventional battle without having his army fully prepared. It was a mistake he would never do again and at Dien Bien Phu three years later, he would get his revenge for Vinh Yen.

The French Revolution is a very messy time period in history, a series of events that seem to just get worse and worse until Napoleon stands as a moderating force acting in the name of peace and tranquility. However, if there is a deciding point of the Revolution, where things will change simply because of a single event, it is at the Battle of Valmy.

France had settled into a Constitutional Monarchy which King Louis XVI was actively working against with vetoes and indifference toward reform. The National Assembly had declared war on Austria and the Duke of Brunswick had declared that terrible things would happen to France if the King and his family was harmed. With his declaration, he gathered a Prussian army and moved into France.

With him accompanied a German poet, Johann Goethe. The romantic poet had many fans (Napoleon included), so going with the army wouldn't have been difficult. However, he was there at Valmy and reported this in his autobiography of the campaign he wrote declades later. What follows is a selection:

So the day was gone; motionless stood the French, Kellermann had also taken a bequemern place; our people pulled one back from the fire, and it was just as if nothing had happened. The greatest consternation spread through the army. On the morning we had not thought otherwise, as to impale and aufzuspeisen, even myself had lured the unconditional trust in such an army, the Duke of Brunswick to participate in this dangerous expedition all the French; but now everyone went before him, could not be seen to be, or if it came to it, to flucehn order or to curse was. We had, just as night was accidentally closed a circle in the middle as usual not even a fire could be lit; most were silent, some argued, and it was missing but actually to each reflection and judgment. Finally they called me what I think about this? Because I had the crowd cheered usually with short sayings and refreshed; This time I said. "Here and now is a new epoch in world history, and you can say you were there"

Source in German, translated by Google Translate via Chrome.

The steadfast nature of Kellermann and his cannonade had changed history. The Prussians had their first major defeat in decades, the myth of Prussian superiority was shattered by an army half made of volunteers. The world change and Goethe reported said this (of course written in hindsight).

Indeed the world did change, the Brunswick Manifesto angered the French people. The victory at Valmy showed that they could fight the European powers and win, so they no longer needed to hold back. The Republic was proclaimed, the King sacked, and the Revolution started back up. Thus started the Terror and thus a new epoch in world history began.