A long but readable history of the Spanish presence in North America from the time of the first European arrival to our own era.
What does it mean to be Hispanic? Is one Hispanic if one does not speak Spanish or Portuguese, or does ethnicity extend beyond the borders of language? So Gibson (Empire’s Crossroads: A History of the Caribbean from Columbus to the Present Day, 2014) wonders at the opening of her synoptic history of the Spanish in North America. Much of that history has not figured in textbooks until recent times, since, as the author observes, Americanness was largely equated with northwestern European ancestry. Yet that Spanish presence is everywhere. Gibson’s first extended look into that history begins at Parris Island, South Carolina, best known as a Marine Corps training center but also the site where Spain and France contended to establish outposts of empire. The author’s account includes well-known historical figures such as Christopher Columbus and Bartolomé de Las Casas, the latter a cleric who decried violence against the Indigenous people of Mexico and inadvertently helped promote the “Black Legend” of Spanish avarice and tyranny. Refreshingly, however, Gibson also embraces lesser-known figures such as the French cartographer Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, whose engravings introduced European readers to scenes of Native American life, and Po’pay, the organizer of a revolt of Pueblo Indians against the Spanish in New Mexico in 1680. Interestingly, as Gibson notes, Po’pay is now one of the two people from New Mexico’s history depicted in the hall of statues in the U.S. Capitol, while controversy has arisen around one of California’s representatives, the missionary Junipero Serra, who has since been implicated in violence against his native charges. Gibson soundly concludes that the history of the Spanish “is central to how the United States has developed and will continue to develop,” lending further utility to her work.
Though much of this history is well-documented in the scholarly literature, it’s undeniably useful to have it in a single survey volume for general readers.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2702-0
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | WORLD | HISTORY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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