Essential American history, deeply researched and written with verve and passion.
An ambitious, kaleidoscopic history of race and politics in Washington, D.C.
The nation’s capital was the first major majority-black city in the United States. “Chocolate City,” the affectionate name created by black locals, has long been the epicenter of America’s national political scene, but for generations, it also has been arguably the sociocultural capital of black America. In this vitally important work, Washington History editor Asch (History/Colby Coll.; The Senator and the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer, 2008) and Musgrove (History/Univ. of Maryland, Baltimore County) narrate a sprawling history of the intersections of race, culture, and politics in Washington. From the early 17th century through the presidency of Barack Obama, the country’s first black president, race has helped to shape and define not only the area that would become the District of Columbia, but also the U.S. as a whole. The authors move chronologically, with chapters covering specific periods in the area’s history, from 1608-1790 through 1995-2010 and beyond. In each section, they show how the city “has had both a catalyzing and at times demoralizing effect on local racial struggles.” Certainly, D.C. has embodied the rhetorical freedoms on which the country was founded, but as the authors show, it also demonstrated the abject failings of those freedoms when it came to black Americans. Of course, the city is much more than just a metaphor; it is also a unique city with its own dynamic history, the political center of the country where its residents, majority black by the 1960s, reside in what the authors call the “voteless capital of democracy.” From slavery through the civil rights movement, from the Constitutional establishment of the District through the election of Obama—a moment wildly celebrated in the city’s streets even if, for black Washingtonians and others, his actual presidency was not the panacea they hoped—the city has captured myriad hypocrisies and paradoxes of race in America.
Essential American history, deeply researched and written with verve and passion.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4696-3586-6
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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