A valuable addition to the literature of slavery.
Survey of the various ways in which slavery has been defended and rebuked by historians over the years.
In this historiographical study, Spillman proposes that the “tradition of Western intellectual engagement with slavery” has been especially active in American historical writing. This American tradition dates to the colonial era, when Anthony Benezet, an early abolitionist, assembled documents and statistics to show, as he wrote, “how by various perfidious, and cruel Methods, the unhappy Negroes are inslaved.” Among other things, Benezet extrapolated a death toll of at least 30,000 on slaving ships plying the Middle Passage. Other historians of early America were more kindly disposed toward slavery, drawing inspiration from Montesquieu’s assurance that there was a “natural slavery” that “is to be limited to some particular parts of the word.” One of Benezet’s peers, David Ramsay, wrote that slavery impoverished the slave states by decreasing the initiative of free workers, an argument countered by appeals to Thomas Malthus’ economic theories: Though supposedly economically inefficient, argued some pro-slavery writers, “slavery insulated slaves from the destructive laws of supply and demand, and provided them with the kind of comfort and security denied wageworkers.” In the mid-20th century, historians began to see slavery as America’s original sin, sometimes with a Marxist edge: C. Vann Woodward, the eminent Southern historian, considered slavery’s founders as “corrupt capitalists.” Although studies of slavery dwindled late in that century, they have since come to the fore among historians, with influence on public interpretations: Tours of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello plantation once referred to slaves as “servants” or “workers,” but they now acknowledge forced labor. In this broad-ranging study, Spillman closes with the 1619 Project, which has excited attention among historians for presumed inaccuracies and among right-wingers for daring to raise the issue of institutional racism in the first place.
A valuable addition to the literature of slavery.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781541602090
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
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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