A valuable addition to antebellum history.
The story of a remarkable woman who experienced freedom and slavery simultaneously.
Myers, a professor of history and gender studies, presents the fascinating story of enslaved mixed-race woman Julia Ann Chinn (c. 1790-1833), who was publicly married to prominent Kentucky politician and decorated War of 1812 veteran Richard Mentor Johnson, who served as vice president in Martin Van Buren’s administration after Chinn's death. Myers details the bizarre arrangement that never saw Chinn freed and provided opportunities and obstacles alike for her and the two daughters she and Johnson shared. The author uses surviving papers and letters to detail how Johnson, due to extended absences that his political career necessitated, entrusted Chinn to manage his vast and bustling Blue Spring Farm near Georgetown, Kentucky. She also managed the federally funded Choctaw Academy boarding school on the farm’s land and served as hostess for glittering affairs in honor of the likes of the Marquis de Lafayette and James Monroe. Myers delves into the complicated social consequences that the Johnson family faced in matters concerning the local Great Crossing Baptist Church, town functions, and even the graveyard. She discusses how Johnson's relationship with Chinn—and his refusal to keep it under wraps, as did contemporaries in similar situations—greatly damaged him politically despite his service in Congress. Myers acknowledges that researching this book was often frustrating and led to dead ends, yet too often she employs what she calls "informed speculation" concerning the mindsets and motivations of individuals that simply cannot be known. Informed speculation is still speculation, and readers should be trusted to render their own questions or conclusions. Still, Myers has conducted arduous research, and she ably introduces a little-known yet important figure in American history, creating a welcome story of “passing, history, and memory that reveals how we all…continue to feel the effects of slavery.”
A valuable addition to antebellum history.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9781469675237
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ferris and Ferris Books/Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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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