An authoritative account of a disturbing chapter in the relations between the U.S. military and Indigenous peoples.
The author of Tecumseh and the Prophet and The Earth Is Weeping returns with a new history of the Creek Indians’ war with U.S. settlers, focusing on the role of Andrew Jackson.
Based largely in present-day Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, and Alabama, the Creeks were descended from the Native peoples who lived in the area before Hernando de Soto’s Spanish conquistadors plundered it. Nonetheless, by the end of the 1700s, despite being divided into small towns with no central authority, the Creeks were “the dominant Indian power in the Deep South.” Cozzens shows how this way of life came under pressure from White settlers eager to exploit the rich farmland inhabited by the Natives. The Creeks’ response was inspired by a group of prophets who preached war against the White men, beginning around 1812. Their followers—called Red Sticks after the wooden war clubs favored by the Creeks—at first attacked isolated White settlers and tribe members who had abandoned traditional ways. The August 1813 attack on Fort Mims, a White stronghold in southwestern Alabama, ended in a brutal massacre, with more than 250 dead, including women and children. That battle ignited a determination among Whites in the region—especially Jackson, who was from Tennessee—to end the uprising by whatever means necessary. Cozzens gives detailed, diligently researched descriptions of the subsequent battles, which culminated in early 1814 at Horseshoe Bend in Alabama, where Jackson’s forces annihilated a Red Stick stronghold, killing some 850 Creeks and allied tribesmen. Jackson parlayed this victory into command of the armies that defeated the British in New Orleans early the next year. A seasoned historical storyteller, Cozzens portrays both Jackson and his Creek adversaries without minimizing their flaws, though he is clearly appalled by Jackson’s later treatment of the Indians during the Trail of Tears. The author includes 10 maps to keep readers oriented.
An authoritative account of a disturbing chapter in the relations between the U.S. military and Indigenous peoples.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9780525659457
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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