Historians will appreciate the wide research and the serious look at the voice of the common man and occasional woman. Fitz...
An examination of the first 50 years of United States history in relation to South America.
It was not the American Revolution that sparked revolutions in Latin America; it was the changes in European empires and years of war at the hands of Napoleon, which left the colonies open to trade with whomever they pleased. When he marched into the Iberian Peninsula, installing his brother, Joseph, on the Spanish throne, Spain’s colonies were on their own. In her first book, Fitz (History/Northwestern Univ.) digs into little-tapped historical resources to demonstrate how support for South American revolutionaries grew and ebbed. The revolutions included the creation of towns named for Simón Bolívar, more common in the West but less so in New England. Curiously, the praise of revolutions that included the end of slavery never dwelt on that fact. It seems as if the U.S. was ambivalent to slavery. News articles were reprinted throughout the country, and they morphed from universalist to racialized rhetoric within 10 years. That early support shattered with Bolívar’s proposal of a Panama Congress of Latin America; he noticeably did not invite the U.S., but his vice president did. The hue and cry in Congress and in the press was verbalized most vocally by Virginia’s John Randolph, who decried the fact that U.S. delegates would have to sit with African descendants, mixed breeds, and Indians. Randolph concluded that the concept of “all men born equal” was a pernicious falsehood. Throughout, the author is a deft guide to this reinterpretation of early American history, a time when “earlier rhetoric of inalienable rights and self-evident truths was increasingly challenged by assertions of white superiority and U.S. exceptionalism.”
Historians will appreciate the wide research and the serious look at the voice of the common man and occasional woman. Fitz shows that history is not always written by wars, treaties, and administrative actions; often, the people take the lead.Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-87140-735-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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.
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
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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