Important American history that is also timely given recent attempts at voter suppression.
A collection of inspiring stories of the women who fought for the 19th Amendment.
Refreshingly, Ware (American Women’s History: A Very Short Introduction, 2015, etc.), the honorary women’s suffrage centennial historian at the Schlesinger Library, focuses on many of the lesser-known but equally audacious, talented women who joined the fight, profiling 19 courageous individuals who thought for themselves and brought their husbands willingly with them. “To bring the story of the…movement to life,” writes the author, “I have organized the narrative as a prosopography featuring nineteen discrete but overlapping biographical stories.” Many suffragists were abolitionists first, which both strengthened and weakened their cause, as the same arguments against granting votes for black men were applied to women. The feminist movement merged with the suffragists in the early 1900s, and feminism brought a broader commitment to economic independence, sexual emancipation, and freedom from the need to marry. Individual states began to give women the vote slowly, beginning with Utah in 1870, although it was temporarily repealed in 1887 in an attempt to control polygamous marriage. By 1896, Colorado, Wyoming, and Idaho had given women the vote. Those who fought for enfranchisement were often writers, artists, and cartoonists, and their work was put to good use in designs for banners, buttons, and posters and in publications like Alice Stone Blackwell’s Woman’s Journal and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Forerunner. There were also those who were practically a one-woman show—e.g., Claiborne Catlin, who raised awareness in Massachusetts during her long unfunded pilgrimage on horseback. Ware also discusses the experiences of black women, like Ida B. Wells and Sojourner Truth, who faced not only sexism, but racism as well. Mary Church Terrell, the daughter of wealthy ex-slaves, not only traveled to Europe, but also addressed the Berlin International Council of Women in 1904. By 1919, most of the Western states had granted women the vote; the next fight would take all their talents to gain ratification of the amendment.
Important American history that is also timely given recent attempts at voter suppression.Pub Date: May 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-674-98668-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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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