A strong addition to modern studies of Reconstruction, bringing feminist and internationalist elements to the fore.
A nuanced history of Reconstruction and the ongoing resistance movements it begat.
Reconstruction, roughly the period between 1865 and 1877, is often considered a failure. Insufficiently enforced by the victorious North, it allowed an intransigent “reassertion of the authority of local white elites to act with impunity and defy the rule of law” in the putatively vanquished South. As Sinha, author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, the cause of Black liberation was halfhearted from the start: Lincoln had not committed himself to a multiracial democracy, but was instead investigating schemes to resettle former slaves in Africa, the Caribbean, and South America, places that would become involved in the expansion of the American empire that began nearly the moment that Reconstruction was abandoned. Yet in the dozen years when Reconstruction was attempted, writes Sinha, allied causes formed. Abolitionists became women’s suffragists, Black as well as white, with one activist for Black rights, Anna Dickinson, hailed as having “statesmanship much beyond our twaddling politicians.” Like Lincoln, Ulysses Grant explored the prospect of colonization by the emancipated, with an eye to annexing the Dominican Republic; those abolitionists and suffragists in turn added opposition to annexation as well as taking up the cause of the rights of laborers. All came collapsing down with the rise of armed terrorism in the South in the form of paramilitary groups such as the Red Shirts and, of course, the KKK, which Sinha considers a forerunner of the “fascist paramilitary organizations that brought terror and violence to cities in Italy and Germany in the twentieth century.” Reconstruction’s failure ushered in authoritarianism, predatory capitalism, and an America that was “not a democracy but a racist, authoritarian state comparable to European colonies in Asia and Africa.”
A strong addition to modern studies of Reconstruction, bringing feminist and internationalist elements to the fore.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9781631498442
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
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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