A thoughtful consideration of an overlooked but clearly central aspect of westward expansion.
Digital and spatial history are brought to bear on the settlement of the West.
“The American state’s violent campaigns were conducted with envelopes as well as rifles,” writes historian Blevins. First came the soldiers, and immediately behind them the letter carriers, developing a “gossamer network” that carried communications among settlements, forts, and centers of government. Drawing on highly granular maps and diagrams throughout, the author opens with a four-line missive from a government inspector who had mislaid an overcoat, bought a new one along the way, and wrote back to declare that the old one was fair game to anyone who found it. Though a seemingly unimportant letter, it speaks to “a network of post offices and mail routes that [connected] Saint Paul, Minnesota, to a remote government outpost in Dakota Territory.” The postal system became an essential component of the infrastructure, and by way of that postal system, settlers on the most remote frontiers could keep in touch with distant relatives and send money back and forth. By 1889, Blevins records, there were 59,000 post offices and some 400,000 miles of postal routes, much of that total overseen by semiofficial agents and contractors in a semiprivatized system that has been revived recently. The post office of yore, as the one of today, was also politicized, with postmasters appointed at the pleasure of the ruling party. So it was that a Republican postmaster proposed a revolutionary innovation, Rural Free Delivery, to link the countryside to industrial and commercial centers, but it would take an intervening Democratic postmaster and then another Republican one before it came into being. Still, Blevins writes, RFD has since “become a powerful symbol of the nation’s transition from its agrarian past into a modern, interconnected society.” Even today, in its decentralized form, the postal system plays a “crucial and underappreciated role within the modern American state.”
A thoughtful consideration of an overlooked but clearly central aspect of westward expansion.Pub Date: April 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-19-005367-3
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
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
An inspiration for those fighting for democratic rights in the face of authoritarianism.
A spirited history of homegrown noncompliance.
There’s the history we know, and then, below that iceberg’s tip, all that we don’t. Stoermer, a public historian and teacher, does yeoman work in digging up stories that are far from the “safe, sanitized, often nationalistic version of the past.” Early on in his narrative, for example, come complex events out of early colonial New England. First is the revolt of Indigenous peoples led by the sachem Metacomet, a revolt that blossomed into “proportionally, the deadliest war in American history for the colonials,” one that textbooks would prefer to forget in favor of rosy stories of the first Thanksgiving. A decade later follows the not-unconnected Salem witchcraft trials, met by dissenters called the Unconfessed, who refused to accept the inquisitors’ assertions of heresy and sorcery, rebuking “a state that demanded its citizens validate its lies.” Given the flood of lies that inundates the country today, their resistance is a particularly valuable lesson. Almost unknown outside specialist circles is Stoermer’s account of the so-called Six, abolitionists who, prosperous and influential, “had accepted that tactical violence was necessary” in resisting slavery, financing, and otherwise supporting John Brown’s rebellion. Their story does not end happily; when the bullets flew, most of them withdrew. Throughout, Stoermer draws lessons to offer by way of a primer for today’s dissenters—for instance, “When systematic oppression operates at scale, resistance needs people who can build sophisticated infrastructure,” and, in doing so, who can contribute to a machinery of resistance to combat the machinery of the state. Usefully, he also reminds readers that even in defeat can come victory of sorts, as with the anti-Federalists who demanded that the Constitution contain amendments that “would later be used to challenge Jim Crow, expand civil rights, and protect individual liberty against state power.”
An inspiration for those fighting for democratic rights in the face of authoritarianism.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9781586424367
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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