Norton makes a good case for considering 1774 and not 1776 to be the foundational year of the new republic.
Study of a tumultuous time that shaped 13 of Great Britain’s North American colonies into a breakaway nation.
The great takeaway from this deeply researched, occasionally plodding history by Norton (Emerita, American History/Cornell Univ., Separated by Their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World, 2011, etc.) is that taxation without representation is reason for restiveness and rebellion. Yet, as she notes, Colonial Americans were not entirely indisposed to paying taxes to the British Crown: The colonists were so enamored of tea that it was difficult for even the most independent-minded to avoid paying the consumption tax the British government placed on it—twice, in fact: once when it arrived in England and once when it arrived in the Colonies. One solution was to acquire tea on the black market, brought in illegally from non-British Caribbean countries or from Holland. Boston alone, writes the author, brought in 265,000 pounds of taxed tea in 1771—but another “575,000 pounds of smuggled tea.” Norton delivers a densely argued account of the economy of tea and other commodities, such as tobacco. The former, in particular, served as a flash point for revolution come the so-called Boston Tea Party that closed the year 1773 and during much of the turmoil of 1774, which would finally boil over in the armed uprising at Concord and Lexington and its spread into revolutionary war. Though the book is most useful to specialist readers, of particular interest are episodes that illustrate how Colonial thinkers viewed the prospect of war with the mother country in that climacteric period. These include a legally minded cleric who calculated that since King George III had effectively broken his bargain with America by “levying war upon us,” all bets were off and the Colonies owed allegiance to neither monarch nor Parliament.
Norton makes a good case for considering 1774 and not 1776 to be the foundational year of the new republic.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-35336-6
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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