Though it may be too academic for some readers, this is an eye-opening work of American history.
An enlightening scholarly study of American Indian history that gets at the root tensions underlying the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee.
Why were the Americans so concerned about the Ghost Dance religion practiced so enthusiastically by the Lakota Sioux and other Great Plains tribes in the 1880s? In this astute new appraisal, Warren (Western U.S. History/Univ. of California, Davis; Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody and the Wild West Show, 2005, etc.) finds in this religion—based on messianic visions by a northern Paiute in Nevada named Wovoka—a shred of hope for Indians denuded of their ancestral power and land, herded into reservations, and stripped of their ability to live by the hunting-and-gathering methods of their elders. The dance took elements of Christianity, such as the messiah figure, and wove them into a joyful communion involving movement and visions of horses and buffalo. Though the dancers could become frenzied and fall unconscious, Warren insists that it was essentially a peaceful dance, stressing harmony within this jagged new age of American industry, wage work, and deracination. However, many Americans—since Indians were not considered citizens until 1924, Warren does not include Indians as Americans here—felt threatened by the dances and banned the gatherings as being warlike, leading to the tragic misunderstanding between the military and hundreds of Lakota at the Pine Ridge Reservation in late 1890. Yet unlike the conclusions by authors and historians such as Dee Brown, author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Warren does not see the Ghost Dance as the death knell of Indian history or spirituality but rather the beginning of Indians’ attempt to live and adapt to a strange new world in which literacy was necessary and industrial capitalism was the driving economic force. Warren also looks at the work of anthropologist James Mooney, who chronicled the passing of “authentic” Indian ways during this era by first studying the Ghost Dance.
Though it may be too academic for some readers, this is an eye-opening work of American history.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-465-01502-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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 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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