A timely and provocative history.
How Black perspectives have long been silenced in America.
In this engaging account, Duke political science professor Smith frames the African American experience through the intriguing lens of evidence. The United States has, she writes, an entrenched “policy, principle, and practice of delegitimizing Black testimony,” even when verbal, textual, or even technological evidence proves otherwise. This process, she maintains, has evolved over four centuries, from the rise of racial slavery in the 17th century to the racial reckoning of 2020 and its backlash. “The mere presence of Black folks reminds us of many inconvenient truths,” she writes. The author contends that correcting this entrenched ignorance will push the nation onto a better path, arguing that “a sustained system of white supremacy depends on the tacit agreement that Black people cannot be believed.” In six chapters, she illuminates how a persistent refusal to engage with Black evidence has resulted in violence, forced labor, economic precarity, an unjust legal system, a racist medical establishment, and startling health disparities across racial lines. Her strongest chapter, “Adultify,” demonstrates how Black children have not been treated as children and have therefore been subjected to violence, punishment, and other inappropriate forms of abuse. The author also chronicles the brave participation of children in the Black freedom struggle and highlights the violent price of their resistance, shedding contextual light on the “talk” that many Black parents have with their children. Importantly, Smith grapples with the aftermath of 2020, including the backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and critical race theory (CRT). DEI and CRT efforts, she asserts, were minimally invasive and flimsy when they were first implemented; politicians and legislators thus “pounced with a vengeance,” dismantling initiatives that “quickly became conservative bogeymen.”
A timely and provocative history.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9781324036272
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
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
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