A frank, well-written look at the dangers we face. We ignore them at our peril.
Following her impressive one-volume history of the United States, These Truths (2018), the acclaimed historian delivers a sharp, short history of nationalism, which she describes as “a contrivance, an artifice, a fiction.”
As New Yorker staff writer Lepore (American History/Harvard Univ.) notes, the term wasn’t even used until the 19th century. In 1830s America, it was called sectionalism, and its adherents included those who favored slavery and native tribes who didn’t recognize the government. By the 1880s, nationalism was fed by Jim Crow laws, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Dawes Act, and the Supreme Court ruling that Native Americans had no birthright to citizenship. The author clearly shows that, while patriotism is characterized by love of your home and people, nationalism features hatred of other countries and immigrants as well as those who are different at home. “Immigration policy is a topic for political debate; reasonable people disagree,” writes Lepore. “But hating immigrants, as if they were lesser humans, is a form of nationalism that has nothing to do with patriotism and much to do with racism.” Furthermore, she writes, “confusing nationalism and patriotism is not always innocent.” The author also takes her fellow historians to task for missing the resurgence of nationalism following World War II. Though there was a comparatively brief lull in the 1930s, with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the nation fell apart. Churches were bombed, civil rights leaders were harassed and even killed, and the Ku Klux Klan reappeared. Hopes rose with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Immigration Act, and the Voting Rights Act, and in the 1980s, nationalism in the U.S. was all but dead. However, it continued to thrive in Bosnia and Rwanda and has carried over to Russia, Turkey, Poland, Hungary, and the Philippines. Lepore writes that while global trade, immigration reform, and the internet were supposed to end divisions, nationalism has surged; now we have politics of identity rather than nationality.
A frank, well-written look at the dangers we face. We ignore them at our peril.Pub Date: May 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63149-641-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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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