edited by Gabor S. Boritt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1992
Seven sterling essays that assess the nature of Lincoln's leadership as commander in chief. Written by an impressive constellation of historians, including five Pulitzer winners, all the pieces but the one by Boritt (Civil War Studies/Gettysburg College; ed., Why the Confederacy Lost, p. 151) are drawn from lectures given annually at Gettysburg College to commemorate Lincoln's address. As James M. McPherson writes in his perceptive ``Lincoln and the Strategy of Unconditional Surrender,'' Lincoln was ``the only President in our history whose entire administration was bounded by the parameters of war.'' Yet his purpose in prosecuting the Civil War, and the war's implications for his posterity, remains as elusive as other aspects of his contradictory personality. Inevitably, this collection's mainstream perspective on Lincoln is refracted through the prism of more recent, convulsive conflicts, including the civil-rights movement (David Brion Davis's ``The Emancipation Movement''), the Vietnam War (Boritt's ``War Opponent and War President''), and the overthrow of Communism and the flowering of East European nationalism (Kenneth Stampp's ``One Alone? The United States and National Self-Determination''). Arthur Schlesinger's piece comparing Lincoln and FDR as war leaders, while written with his customary grace and political incisiveness, also betrays his tendency to minimize the failings of his heroes. The comprehensive overviews in these pieces, however, especially in Carl Degler's examination of 19th-century national unification movements, inspires deepened appreciation for Lincoln's ``new birth of freedom.'' Particularly for Boritt and Robert Bruce (``The Shadow of the Coming War''), Lincoln emerges as a compellingly paradoxical figure: a hater of violence who refused to back away from the bloodiest war in American history; a practical politician whose resort to emancipation ennobled a gory struggle. First-rate commentary by some of our finest historians on the President tested more than any other by war. (Twenty b&w illustrations.)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-19-507891-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1992
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edited by Gabor S. Boritt
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edited by Gabor S. Boritt
by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979
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
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by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales
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by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez
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by Howard Zinn
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