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AMERICAN POLITICS IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC

THE NEW NATION IN CRISIS

An insightful treatment of the ``hothouse atmosphere of passion, suspicion, and fear'' through which the US passed in the Federalist Era (1789-1801). To some extent, Sharp (History/Syracuse University) sets up a false thesis to knock down: that historians have tended to discount the birth pains of the young republic. Moveover, he accords scant space to Alexander Hamilton's landmark financial program. Still, he forcefully recounts one of America's most turbulent eras, in which the two-party system came into being. The Founding Fathers' high expectations that the new republic would be led by a virtuous aristocratic elite that would ensure civic harmony (as epitomized by George Washington) were soon dashed, and, by 1792, two opposing camps had formed: the pro-administration, pro-British Federalists, based in New England; and the anti-administration, pro-French Republicans, based in the South and led by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. The Federalists and Republicans each professed abhorrence of ``faction'' while demonizing the other side, and each party was prepared to go to the constitutional brink to see the triumph of its principles, with the Federalists abridging free speech in the Alien and Sedition Acts while Jefferson and Madison countenanced nullification with the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. Sharp convincingly argues that the election of 1800 ranks behind only that of 1860 as a challenge to the Union and the Constitution. With the House of Representatives called on to break an electoral tie between fellow Republicans Jefferson and Aaron Burr, some Federalists schemed to avoid ceding the election to the Republicans at all, while the Republican governors of Virginia and Pennsylvania prepared to call out the state militia in the event of Federalist usurpation. Jefferson's election averted the immediate crisis, but the genie of sectionalism was out of the bottle to bedevil the nation up to the Civil War. A cogent analysis of how the Constitution was tested by—and then came to accommodate—the brawling two-party system.

Pub Date: Dec. 15, 1993

ISBN: 0-300-05530-7

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Yale Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1993

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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