Vividly captures the controversy and pain that accompanied this reopening of a dark chapter in American history.
A historian unravels the tangled story behind the establishment of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site.
On November 29, 1864, with almost six months of bloody fighting remaining in the Civil War, U.S. Army Col. John Chivington and a force of Colorado militia attacked a Cheyenne and Arapaho village about 40 miles from Fort Lyon. For Chivington, the engagement was heroic, a defeat of likely Confederate sympathizers, Indians who had terrorized the frontier. For his subordinate, Silas Soule, the “battle” was a slaughter of defenseless women and children, and he ordered his men not to fire or take part in the atrocities that ensued. For George Bent, witness and survivor, the massacre at Sand Creek constituted a cultural catastrophe. These three competing narratives developed in the immediate wake of Sand Creek, and they persist more than 140 years later. Kelman (History/Univ. of California, Davis; A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans, 2003) frequently harks back to them as he recounts the effort to bring the site under the supervision of the National Park Service. Instead of the much-wished-for “healing” and “reconciliation,” in publications, in public meetings and on the Internet, old conflicts were renewed among constituencies—private landowners, the tribes and the federal government—jostling to seize control of the Sand Creek narrative. Notwithstanding broad agreement on the geographical dimensions of the site, interpreting events proved remarkably contentious. Traditional historians, ethnographers, archaeologists and cartographers all figured into the effort to memorialize Sand Creek. While Kelman makes his sympathies clear, he mostly plays it straight in presenting the various clashing viewpoints. The Sand Creek Massacre, he notes, had its origins in the fight for control of the West. The tortured cultural and political struggle to properly remember it resulted in the 391st unit of the National Park Service.
Vividly captures the controversy and pain that accompanied this reopening of a dark chapter in American history.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-674-04585-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally unfocused, but redeems itself by putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.
A ground-level illustration of how the plague ravaged Europe.
For his tenth book, science writer Kelly (Three on the Edge, 1999, etc.) delivers a cultural history of the Black Death based on accounts left by those who witnessed the greatest natural disaster in human history. Spawned somewhere on the steppes of Central Asia, the plague arrived in Europe in 1347, when a Genoese ship carried it to Sicily from a trading post on the Black Sea. Over the next four years, at a time when, as the author notes, “nothing moved faster than the fastest horse,” the disease spread through the entire continent. Eventually, it claimed 25 million lives, one third of the European population. A thermonuclear war would be an equivalent disaster by today's standards, Kelly avers. Much of the narrative depends on the reminiscences of monks, doctors, and other literate people who buried corpses or cared for the sick. As a result, the author has plenty of anecdotes. Common scenes include dogs and children running naked, dirty, and wild through the streets of an empty village, their masters and parents dead; Jews burnt at the stake, scapegoats in a paranoid Christian world; and physicians at the University of Paris consulting the stars to divine cures. These tales give the author opportunities to show Europeans—filthy, malnourished, living in densely packed cities—as easy targets for rats and their plague-bearing fleas. They also allow him to ramble. Kelly has a tendency to lose the trail of the disease in favor of tangents about this or that king, pope, or battle. He returns to his topic only when he shifts to a different country or city in a new chapter, giving the book a haphazard feel. Remarkably, the story ends on a hopeful note. After so many perished, Europe was forced to develop new forms of technology to make up for the labor shortage, laying the groundwork for the modern era.
Occasionally unfocused, but redeems itself by putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-000692-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.
A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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