An insightful study of the birth of the American empire and the resulting “American century.”
A broad-ranging history of America’s early evolution as a world power, a more deliberate process than is often supposed.
In this second volume of the Dangerous Nation trilogy, Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, writes that late-19th-century America was a kind of conservative paradise. With a tiny military to support, taxes were low, and isolation “meant less need for strong central government, less military bureaucracy, and less need for speedy and efficient decision-making.” In this regime, foreign policy was an afterthought. That began to change with the war with Spain in 1898, which in some ways was a foregone conclusion, for even if Americans were not broadly interested in the outside world, they didn’t mind going to war—and Cuba, at least in the eyes of the Founding Fathers, was “a natural appendage of the growing country.” Seizing former Spanish possessions also helped curb other nations’ designs. Germany, for instance, clearly wanted the Philippines after occupying Chinese territory in 1898 and touching off a colonial land grab throughout East Asia. The U.S. clung to the Philippines not just to deny the archipelago to other powers, but also to civilize—in Protestant terms, of course—what William Howard Taft called “our little brown brothers.” Germany faded from the scene in Asia, but it soon turned to the project of a comprehensive “domination of Europe.” Again, Americans didn’t much care, and after World War I, the nation fell into “a profoundly anti-liberal mood” that supposed that democracy was doomed, a mood that Axis powers used to their advantage. Kagan cogently examines what he considers certain inevitabilities (e.g., the attack on Pearl Harbor) while delivering novel interpretations of events. For example, he suggests that Hitler invaded the Soviet Union earlier than intended in order to inspire the Japanese attack, which he supposed, incorrectly, would tie up the American military in the Pacific and keep it out of Europe.
An insightful study of the birth of the American empire and the resulting “American century.”Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9780307262943
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
HISTORY | MILITARY | UNITED STATES | WORLD
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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