An in-depth reassessment of the war on drugs, with lessons for students of American religion, crime, and White supremacy.
The American crusade against intoxicants began earlier than you might think.
Monteith, a professor of religious history, offers a rigorous history that locates the origin of the contemporary so-called war on drugs in the Christian temperance movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The author cites and investigates a matrix of American Protestant beliefs regarding social progress, race, and colonialism that, together, helped craft “a society where it seems self-evident that governments should regulate substance use.” This is a work of academic religious study, but Monteith explains with lay-level clarity concepts like morality and postmillennialist eschatology, which are essential for understanding the cultural context in which Protestant activism eventually came to dominate American politics around drugs and alcohol—which were, to them, less distinct than we generally think today. The author argues that the driving forces were Protestant beliefs that the Second Coming hinged on society’s moral perfection, which could be achieved through the cumulative salvation of sober-minded individuals. Because “Protestants frequently treated the mind as a sacred location for God’s work on earth,” they saw the distortions of drug and alcohol use as violations of “biomorality.” These beliefs, often coded in racist, anti-Indigenous, and nativist language, contributed to the moral panic of the eugenics movement. Monteith narrates a strategic shift in which activists—still ushering in the kingdom of God—came to downplay explicit religious arguments in favor of pseudoscientific progress narratives designed to appeal to an increasingly intersectional public. He does not deny that the drug war has been influenced by racism, class antagonism, and other secular forces emphasized in previous histories. Rather, he positions them all as tools and outcroppings of a “transdenominational Protestantism [that] held a profoundly hegemonic grip on American culture.”
An in-depth reassessment of the war on drugs, with lessons for students of American religion, crime, and White supremacy.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781479817924
Page Count: 320
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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 Yorkerstaff 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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