A fine contribution to the literature of Colonial America, where peace was far harder to achieve than war.
A complex tale of a now-forgotten crime that shaped Native-White relations in the British Colonies of North America.
In Pennsylvania in the winter of 1722, John and Edmund Cartlidge, fur traders, visited a Seneca hunter named Sawantaeny. The brothers plied him with booze, writes NYU history professor Eustace, “hoping to lubricate their negotiations with enough alcohol that Sawantaeny would be too content to desire anything more valuable than second-rate rum for his efforts, if not too compromised to demand a fair deal.” When rum didn’t do the trick and Sawantaeny produced a musket, Edmund, a hulking man, grabbed it and hit Sawantaeny hard enough to shatter his skull. That the proposed trade was unfair was not lost on the nearby Natives who heard the story, including representatives from nations up and down the coast and far inland and powerful members of the Iroquois Nation. A mendacious Colonial governor tried to keep a lid on the murder while the governor of next-door Maryland was quick to order an aide “to contrive to let the Indians know that the Murderers are under the Pennsylvania Government and that we are no ways Concern’d in it.” From these basic elements—and with a vivid cast of characters that expands to include a shrewd go-between named “Captain Civility,” who spoke all the languages of the Susquehanna River Valley and embodied the Indigenous tradition “of assigning a person to take up membership in multiple communities, serving as the living embodiment of civil society”—the author fashions an engrossing historical excavation. The case traveled far, informing treaty agreements that were held in force for decades even as John Cartlidge proved a go-between on his own merits. The story has countless moving parts and one central mystery that demand subtle exposition, and Eustace navigates it all with skill and economy.
A fine contribution to the literature of Colonial America, where peace was far harder to achieve than war.Pub Date: April 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63149-587-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
