Roughly 60 to 70 pages on each of the four political crises, filled with speeches, letters, editorials, polemics, debates,...
A historian offers a “closer look at the 1790s” designed to “remind us that nationalism and patriotism once carried more positive meanings—and give us reason to believe they can do so again.”
In 1789, when the war hero George Washington became the first president, everyone expected great changes. They were not disappointed, writes Berkin (Emerita, History/Baruch Coll.; The Bill of Rights: The Fight to Secure America’s Liberties, 2015, etc.) in this insightful political history of the following decade. Washington and his supporters may have called themselves Federalists, but Berkin astutely notes that they were nationalists. They had written the Constitution and fought for ratification, and they wanted to make it work. They eventually succeeded after overcoming four bitter crises, which the author recounts at great length. No one realized how much the 1791 excise tax on distilled spirits would upset frontier farmers, who protested, often violently. Washington fumed at this “whiskey rebellion” for three years before crushing it. In 1793, Edmond Charles Genet, the “young and brash” new French minister, began aggressively recruiting Americans to support France’s war against Britain. This outraged Washington’s administration, but by year’s end, he had self-destructed. The XYZ Affair is remembered as America’s refusal to pay the corrupt French government a bribe. In truth, American diplomats dithered for months before deciding that there would be no quid pro quo. Opponents denounced the 1798 Aliens and Sedition Act as an attack on free speech. Controversy during its short, stormy life centered on interpreting the Constitution, which, Berkin emphasizes, showed that Americans had begun taking it seriously.
Roughly 60 to 70 pages on each of the four political crises, filled with speeches, letters, editorials, polemics, debates, and legislation, may daunt some readers, but Berkin makes a reasonable case that the Founders’ resolve left the U.S. a viable nation.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-465-06088-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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