The story of an 1874 kidnapping in Philadelphia that received sustained national attention.
In her first book, Philadelphia resident Hagen uses the backdrop of her city to re-create the uproar when at least two kidnappers snatched 4-year-old Charley Ross from his yard on July 1, 1874. The kidnappers issued ransom demands to Charley's father Christian, a dry-goods store owner, and Charley's mother Sarah. The author writes that before 1874, there had not been a recorded kidnapping for ransom in the United States. Without solid leads at first, police in Philadelphia and later in New York City (where a potentially knowledgeable informant resided) eventually identified likely suspects. The two leading suspects, career criminals William Mosher and Joseph Douglas, soon died in a shootout during a burglary unrelated to the kidnapping. During 1875, a former New York City police officer named William Westervelt received a prison sentence from a jury convinced he had served as an accomplice in the kidnapping. Westervelt was Mosher's brother in law, and he never stopped maintaining his innocence. Despite reward money of at least $25,000, nobody came forward with information reliable enough that it led to the return of Charley to his family. The kidnappers either killed the boy or left him somewhere under an assumed name, never to be reunited with his parents and his siblings. Hagen skillfully narrates a saga that transcends one kidnapping, a saga tied up with the World’s Fair that was about to open in Philadelphia. City officials feared the negative publicity from the kidnapping would reduce attendance, and thus cost Philadelphia much-needed revenue. In addition, Hagen folds in historical perspective about inefficient and sometimes even corrupt police practices in Philadelphia, New York and other metropolises. New York City police superintendent George Walling serves as an especially sharp example of the author’s accomplished character development.
A slice of American crime history both instructive and tragically entertaining.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59020-086-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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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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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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