Enlightening, revolutionary thinking.
An examination of the effects of the American Revolution on ordinary people, with some anxious glances at our political divisions today.
In the latest from esteemed historian Breen (Law and Governance/Library of Congress; George Washington’s Journey: The President Forges a New Nation, 2016, etc.), the celebrated names of the Founding Fathers appear only rarely. Instead, the author pursues quieter, somewhat neglected stories that begin to answer the question: How did everyday people deal with the stress and contention of the war? Breen digs into a wide variety of documentary evidence, including journals, letters, newspapers, and published sermons. In his assiduous research, he discovered some remarkable things, perhaps most notably the restraint that those who supported the Revolution employed when dealing with the Loyalists. Yes, he notes throughout, there were countless instances of violence and loss of life, and there were those who retained a deep bitterness for the rest of their days, but the overwhelming response was a faith in the law and a belief in liberty. Local committees examined individual cases, settled disputes, and issued punishments, which, in many cases, they would suspend if the violators pledged allegiance to the new country. Breen also looks at the Loyalists themselves—their own actions and fears—and helps us to understand their motivations. By exploring numerous sermons from the day, he shows how religious leaders encouraged the Revolution, especially by emphasizing Old Testament analogies. The author does not ignore the intractable issue of race. He shows us that the Northern revolutionaries, especially, were quite aware of the hypocrisy of bellowing about freedom while countless people were hopelessly enslaved. In several places—and at the very end—Breen wonders if, in our current era, we will be able to employ the essential lessons about unity that he has extracted from the past.
Enlightening, revolutionary thinking.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-674-97179-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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 Yorkerstaff 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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