An instructive take on a period in American political history that became “the first time a cause and campaign of a major...
A history of the intricate reworking of American political parties in light of the divisive views about the expansion of slavery into the West.
The presidential election of 1856, the first to feature a Republican candidate, played out amid an eruption of murderous feelings about the Kansas-Nebraska Act, passed by a deeply riven Congress two years before. Former Congressional Quarterly editor Bicknell (America 1844: Religious Fervor, Westward Expansion, and the Presidential Election that Transformed the Nation, 2014, etc.) offers a tidy narrative full of vivid political personalities of the time—e.g., Illinois Sen. Stephen A. Douglas, who fashioned the controversial bill to appease Southerners; fiery Massachusetts abolitionist Charles Sumner, who ferociously condemned it; and President Franklin Pierce, who allowed himself to be manipulated by Southerners and signed the bill. Indeed, the Kansas-Nebraska Act fatally splintered the Whigs, already weakened by the Compromise of 1850 into pro- and anti-slavery factions; the midterm elections of 1854 would bear this out in pro-soil victories against the Democrats, while Abraham Lincoln, still a Whig in 1855, was beat out for an Illinois Senate seat by an anti-Nebraska man, Lyman Trumbull. So what part does Western explorer and romantic hero John C. Frémont play in all this? Curiously, he is the one ill-defined character in this narrative, portrayed largely by accounts from his contemporaries—e.g., his influential father-in-law, Thomas Hart Benton, who had always defended him from scrapes before but washed his hands of Frémont with his decision to align with the new Republican Party; and Frémont’s extraordinarily accomplished activist wife, Jessie, who organized his campaign, edited his books, and galvanized women to become politically involved. On the whole, Bicknell does a solid job bringing together many complicated threads: Dred Scott, two political nominating conventions, the Mormon wagon trains traversing the country, and the simmering resentment of immigrants that characterized the time.
An instructive take on a period in American political history that became “the first time a cause and campaign of a major political party resonated with women—and with free people of color.”Pub Date: June 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61373-797-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
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