An engaging study, full of odd twists and forgotten episodes.
Just in time for the big-budget remake of The Alamo: not a tie-in, but a learned account of how Texas came to be an independent republic, and then the Lone Star State.
The Alamo fell to Mexican dictator Antonio López de Santa Anna’s troops on March 6, 1836, at the cost of some two hundred rebel defenders and perhaps twice as many attackers—a far count from the endless heaps of Mexican corpses that littered the set of John Wayne’s film version. Santa Anna’s chance defeat at San Jacinto not long afterward fulfilled the efforts of a generation of Americans to seize Texas. More immediately, writes Davis (Center for Civil War Studies/Virginia Tech; Look Away!, 2002, etc.), it spelled the collapse of law and order in Texas, “especially on the outer fringes of settlement, where lawless whites and opportunistic Indians raided settlers. . . . The war left communities largely on their own.” Thus the rise of lone marshals, stalwart rangers, and other legendary figures of the frontier. The realities of the war of independence were far from romantic, though, and certainly more complex than the standard textbook view would have it. Davis skillfully describes the roles of often-overlooked participants in the revolution, such as native tejanos who wanted freedom from Spain and then Mexico, but not absorption into the US. He also extends the chronology of the independence movement to the beginning of the 19th century, when strategists in Washington vied with foreign adventurers such as would-be pirate king Louis Michel Aury to lure Texas away from its beleaguered Spanish masters. In the end, Davis shows, “Texian” newcomers effectively wrested the movement from the tejanos, thwarting their ambitions to establish a Catholic, Spanish-speaking republic and attach Texas to the slaveholding South. Could it have been otherwise? “Almost surely,” writes the author, “the United States was going to expand to fill its continent sooner or later, though nothing is inevitable in history.”
An engaging study, full of odd twists and forgotten episodes.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2004
ISBN: 0-684-86510-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
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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