A fresh, authoritative historical inquiry.
An art and cultural historian spotlights racial propaganda fueled by willed blindness.
Drawing on abundant scholarship, Lewis investigates images that contributed to Americans’ conception of race from the Civil War through the Jim Crow era. She focuses particularly on the connection made between whiteness and the Caucasus, a region that waged a war against Russian incursion from 1817 to 1864. Americans were hugely sympathetic to the Caucasus, which a prominent 18th-century German naturalist had argued was the “homeland of racial whiteness.” In a society consumed by “the urgent need to shore up the idea of race,” Caucasian came to be conflated with white, a concept that persisted despite stark visual evidence to the contrary. Lewis examines a range of images—paintings, sculpture, and photographs—to reveal how “the tactics of unseeing” enabled this racial fiction to be “hardened into foundational fact.” Women from the Caucasus, for example, were reputed to be the most beautiful in the world, a belief that P.T. Barnum exploited by exhibiting “Circassian Beauties” in his various venues. Images of the Caucasus circulating after the Civil War revealed a racially mixed population, and by 1876, another conflict, which Americans called a “Mahomedan revolt,” recast the region as Muslim and Asian, “a place filled with ‘alien racial elements.’” Nevertheless, the definition of Caucasian as European white, at the pinnacle of the racial hierarchy, was underscored by many, including Woodrow Wilson. This arch-segregationist’s racist policies were abetted by what Lewis terms visual “racial detailing…assessment filtered through brutal stereotypes and narratives” and a malignant precursor to today’s racial profiling.
A fresh, authoritative historical inquiry.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9780674238343
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
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
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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