An expert addition to the boundless literature surrounding Washington and the founding era.
The first president’s role in creating his eponymous city.
Historian Watson reminds readers that the Constitution granted Congress the power to create a national capital. However, from the first meeting in 1789, controversy over the location was fierce. Washington, writes the author, “grumbled” that it was causing “ ‘more bitterness, more sectional divisiveness and more commentary by participants’ than any other issue, including slavery.” Watson joins fellow historians in praising the “Compromise of 1790,” which broke the logjam. With Washington’s approval, Alexander Hamilton sought a federal government that could assume the states’ war debts and establish a national bank. Thomas Jefferson and the anti-Federalists hated the ideas. In exchange for dropping their opposition, Hamilton agreed to use his influence for a Potomac capital. The author ably describes the tumultuous process that followed, a tale that will be familiar to readers well versed in other grand projects like the Panama Canal or Transcontinental Railroad. Historians extol the design of Washington’s chosen architect, Pierre L’Enfant, but he was so obnoxious that everyone approved his dismissal after a year. The Founding Fathers, brilliant in so many ways, agreed that taxes were unnecessary and that selling lots in the new city would pay for everything. The result was two decades of pleas for loans, unpaid bills, and construction delays. Working conditions were brutal, and America possessed few skilled craftsmen, so builders imported workers from Europe and eventually used a great deal of slave labor (“cruelly inevitable”). By the time John Adams took up residence in November 1800, the White House roof was partially completed. Furthermore, “only a third of the nearby Capitol was nearing completion, temporary shanty homes dotted the landscape, and construction equipment littered the grounds of the unfinished buildings.” Matters improved, but it took another decade. Washington’s final battle turned out to be unexpectedly difficult, and Watson makes a strong argument that only his astute leadership assured victory.
An expert addition to the boundless literature surrounding Washington and the founding era.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-62616-784-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Georgetown Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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
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