An insightful treatment of the ``hothouse atmosphere of passion, suspicion, and fear'' through which the US passed in the Federalist Era (1789-1801). To some extent, Sharp (History/Syracuse University) sets up a false thesis to knock down: that historians have tended to discount the birth pains of the young republic. Moveover, he accords scant space to Alexander Hamilton's landmark financial program. Still, he forcefully recounts one of America's most turbulent eras, in which the two-party system came into being. The Founding Fathers' high expectations that the new republic would be led by a virtuous aristocratic elite that would ensure civic harmony (as epitomized by George Washington) were soon dashed, and, by 1792, two opposing camps had formed: the pro-administration, pro-British Federalists, based in New England; and the anti-administration, pro-French Republicans, based in the South and led by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. The Federalists and Republicans each professed abhorrence of ``faction'' while demonizing the other side, and each party was prepared to go to the constitutional brink to see the triumph of its principles, with the Federalists abridging free speech in the Alien and Sedition Acts while Jefferson and Madison countenanced nullification with the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. Sharp convincingly argues that the election of 1800 ranks behind only that of 1860 as a challenge to the Union and the Constitution. With the House of Representatives called on to break an electoral tie between fellow Republicans Jefferson and Aaron Burr, some Federalists schemed to avoid ceding the election to the Republicans at all, while the Republican governors of Virginia and Pennsylvania prepared to call out the state militia in the event of Federalist usurpation. Jefferson's election averted the immediate crisis, but the genie of sectionalism was out of the bottle to bedevil the nation up to the Civil War. A cogent analysis of how the Constitution was tested by—and then came to accommodate—the brawling two-party system.
Pub Date: Dec. 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-300-05530-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1993
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
