A searing, stirring outline of the historical and contemporary significance of white Christian nationalism.
A historian reframes the nation’s legacy of racial prejudice.
In his latest, Jones, the author of White Too Long and The End of White Christian America, argues persuasively that the ideological origins of American racism are best understood in relation to religious edicts dating back to the late 15th century. The Catholic Church’s Doctrine of Discovery gave divine sanction to the imperialist ambitions of white Christians and provided rationalizations for centuries of violence directed against nonwhite peoples. In tracing out this history of toxic ideas and their real-world consequences, the author focuses on three representative outrages from the 20th century: the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955, the lynching of three Black circus workers in Minnesota in 1920, and the murders of hundreds of African Americans during the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. As Jones shows, rather than isolated events, these explosions of racist aggression and justifications invoking white supremacy form a consistent pattern in each region’s history, beginning with the targeting of Indigenous peoples. Through its linking of narratives typically considered separately, the book provides a revelatory view of U.S. history and its guiding assumptions. “If we do the hard work of pushing upriver, we find that the same waters that produced the Negro problem also spawned the Indian problem,” writes Jones. “If we dare to go further, at the headwaters is the white Christian problem.” In the final sections, the author emphasizes the relevance of ongoing political battles over the interpretation of history and acknowledgements of culpability. “Across the spectrum of issues, and from national presidential elections to local school board meetings,” he writes, “the most vehement and visceral fights to come will likely center not on policy but on historical narratives, public rituals, and civic spaces.” Jones makes the value of carrying out this conceptual reframing urgently apparent.
A searing, stirring outline of the historical and contemporary significance of white Christian nationalism.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668009512
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
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
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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