A fresh, disquieting look into America’s traumatic past.
A history of slaves who sought legal redress to obtain emancipation.
For historian and Guggenheim fellow Thomas, investigating suits brought by slaves against slaveholders from America’s founding through the end of the Civil War had more than academic interest: His own ancestors, he was shocked to discover, included slave owners in Maryland and a lawyer who staunchly defended slave owners’ interests. Interwoven with his compelling historical narrative, the author recounts conferences, meetings, and his attendance at the Summer Institute for Reconciliation at Duke Divinity School, where he met descendants of slaves, pastors, community organizers, and others to examine the reality and consequences of racism. Drawing on long-buried archival material—depositions, lawyers’ notes, fragmentary case files—Thomas fulfills his goal of chronicling the lawsuits and vividly bringing to light the lives and experiences of the individuals involved, particularly the Queen family, which sought freedom from bondage, and his own, the slaveholding Ducketts. The freedom suits, writes the author “were, in effect, a public counterpart of the Underground Railroad,” enacted across the country, in every court available—even up to the Supreme Court, which heard an appeal in 1813. Many of the suits were against the Jesuits, who, by 1767, “owned more slaves than any other person or organization in the Western Hemisphere.” They predominated in the American Colonies, where Jesuit priests were major tobacco planters. In Maryland, enslaved families won hundreds of freedom suits; some who were emancipated were able to liberate other family members, and some were able to acquire property. But winning a suit did not necessarily mean liberation for all; for some, “freedom did not sever ties as much as strain, twist, and bend them into new configurations.” Thomas reveals the deep-seated contradictions inherent in the slaveholding culture. Francis Scott Key, for example, a lawyer who represented more than 100 enslaved families, “also bought slaves and married into one of the largest slaveholding families in Maryland.”
A fresh, disquieting look into America’s traumatic past.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23412-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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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