The volume provides a richness of political context as well as showing how the war was transformed from an initial defense...
A public-private partnership between the United States Military Academy and Rowan Technology Solutions reshapes the six chapters of the academy's History of Warfare on the Civil War to bring its specialist curriculum before a general audience.
Edited by Rogers, Seidule and Watson, three current members of the academy's history department, the volume assembles contributions from five of the country's most distinguished historians of the Civil War: Mark E. Neely Jr., Joseph T. Glatthaar, Steven E. Woodworth, Earl J. Hess and James K. Hogue. “The Civil War was the most traumatic event in the United States Military Academy’s history,” writes Seidule in the introduction. “During the 1850s, the Academy changed from an institution that promoted nationalism to a bitterly divided school.” The book begins with Neely's contribution on the border states and origins of the war and concludes with Hogue’s writings on Reconstruction. Glatthaar and Woodworth divide the war in the East and West between them, and Hess takes on strategy coordination and the final phases of the war. Threaded throughout the text are campaign and battle maps and an extensive collection of contemporary illustrations, including portraits, cartoons, leaflets, newspaper reproductions and posters. The 50-plus maps in the collection provide campaign overviews as well as timelines and deployment details illustrating chains of command, numbers of troops by unit and special equipment. The series about Ulysses Grant's campaign in the West, with three maps on the Kentucky campaign, five on successive operations against Vicksburg, and two others including Chickamauga, are exemplary. Also included in the volume are full-page illustrations of significant leaders—including Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox and the only confirmed photograph of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg—and the uniforms of different branches of the service.
The volume provides a richness of political context as well as showing how the war was transformed from an initial defense of the Union to a war for emancipation.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-1476782621
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
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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