A solid contribution to the history of Black New York.
Vigorous history of a free Black community in Brooklyn and its contributions to the making of modern New York.
In the late 18th and 19th centuries, writes Bronx Community College professor Kanakamedala, Black people constituted a large percentage of the population of Brooklyn, then an independent city. Unlike Manhattan, most of the land around the settlement was agricultural, and many of those Blacks were enslaved as farm workers. Even after their “gradual emancipation”—a charged term that speaks to the fact that it took three full decades after the end of the American Revolution for New York to end slavery—the Black workers of Brooklyn were confined to manual labor as “blacksmiths, boot blacks, cartmen, dock workers, general laborers, and whitewashers.” Some free Black people formed communities away from Brooklyn itself, places now enfolded by Williamsburg, Vinegar Hill, DUMBO, and other locales. Brooklyn proper also saw the formation of urban villages that were “part of a sophisticated Northern anti-slavery space rooted in, and integral to, Brooklyn’s own steady growth.” These communities were the sites of sui generis public libraries, schools, churches, and other institutions that resisted the structural racism of the era. Examining archival records and focusing on several Black families, and especially Black women, Kanakamedala charts changes in that community over the decades, with Brooklyn serving as a key transit point in the Underground Railroad network that was “by no means, a bastion of liberty.…But it did offer pockets of safety and refuge to its resident free Black communities—anchored by Weeksville—and to others seeking freedom in the North.” Brooklyn was a center of military recruitment for Black troops during the Civil War and, during Reconstruction, a place from which several Black activists relocated to the South, “where they could help newly freed people.”
A solid contribution to the history of Black New York.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9781479833092
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Washington Mews/New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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