A necessary contribution to American studies for all the shameful episodes it recounts.
A searching study of the role of mixed-descent people, with Indigenous and other ancestry, over 400 years of American history.
University of Oklahoma history professor Hyde, author of the Bancroft Prize–winning Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West, 1800-1860, turns her attention to an overlooked aspect of the peopling of North America: the union of Native Americans with people from other continents, their descendants often derided as “half-breeds” and worse. It’s a bitter irony that whereas many Americans are quick to declare Indigenous ancestry today, it was not so long ago that mixed-descent people tried to hide their Native ancestry simply to survive. “Like boy thrown at a Black man, the word half-breed became poison intending to kill,” writes the author, adding that “renaming Half-Breed Lake in Minnesota and Montana, or Half- Breed Road in Iowa and Nebraska, also covers up a long history of intermarriage.” Hyde closely examines the lineages of people such as a half-Swiss, half-Cree woman who fought for civil rights for Native people. The author takes a particularly deep dive into the history of George Bent and his descendants; Bent was a White trader who arrived on the Colorado frontier and married a succession of Cheyenne wives and “lost dozens of family members at the Sand Creek and Washita massacres in the 1860s.” Some Native groups, Hyde writes, were welcoming of newcomers; the Ojibwe, for instance, had intermarried with French trappers for generations before Americans arrived. Other groups were more reluctant—but, as Hyde allows, biology usually wins out over culture. This was of little interest to the federal, territorial, and state governments, however, all of which formulated laws to make intermarriage illegal, laws that remained in force until very recently and required mixed-descent people, who knew that “White America couldn’t tolerate reminders of the racial mixing that anchored American history,” to disguise their heritage.
A necessary contribution to American studies for all the shameful episodes it recounts.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-393-63409-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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