An enlightening history of American westward expansion.
The history of the founding of the U.S. Army in response to indigenous push back against the takeover of their territory.
According to this tightly focused account by Hogeland (Founding Finance: How Debt, Speculation, Foreclosures, Protests, and Crackdowns Made Us a Nation, 2012, etc.), American “existence, purpose, and future” were first clarified by the need to make military incursions into hostile Indian territory. The state-supported militias that had sustained the early republic and largely won the War of Independence against the British were no longer enough in conquering new territory westward. George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and other nationalists fervently believed that this land belonged to Americans by native right and indeed had been ceded as a “gigantic mishmash” by Britain in the 1783 Treaty of Paris. However, the Indian confederation, made up of the Miami, Shawnee, Delaware, and other western tribes who lived and hunted west of the Ohio River and were led by Blue Jacket and Little Turtle, successfully resisted American incursion into their territory, climaxing in the utter rout of Gen. Arthur St. Clair’s troops in the Battle of the Wabash in November 1791. Hogeland points to this battle, which resulted in the deaths of some 650 American troops, including Gen. Richard Butler and many civilians, as the moment that galvanized “Americans’ real emergence as a national people.” The author also highlights Washington’s efforts to use St. Clair’s ignominious defeat to gain support for a standing army; this was not an easy task in the face of popular resistance led by “state sovereigntists” like Patrick Henry, in spite of the newly ratified Constitution’s assertion that Congress had the power to create an army. Hogeland vividly delineates these seminal personalities, such as the first commander of Washington’s Western army, “Mad Anthony” Wayne; the Indian leaders Blue Jacket and Little Turtle as well as the half-white Indian ally, Alexander McKee, angling for British aid in the next American-Indian clash.
An enlightening history of American westward expansion.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-10734-5
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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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