A groundbreaking history that will no doubt contribute to a reappraisal of some deep-rooted founding myths.
An eye-opening examination of how America's colonial-era colleges were rooted in slave economies and “stood beside church and state as the third pillar of a civilization built on bondage.”
Wilder (History/MIT; In the Company of Black Men: The African Influence on African American Culture in New York City, 2002, etc.) establishes the interrelationship between slave-cultivated plantations and the academic institutions that lived off the rents gathered through endowments, leases, mortgage debts and other instruments of feudal-style bondage. At first, land holdings were acquired through conquest of native populations, followed by successive phases of clearance and resettlement. “The Indians-for-African trade reduced the risk of enslaved Indians fleeing to their own lands or inciting conflicts,” writes Wilder, “and brought a population of African slaves who lacked knowledge of the local geography and languages but possessed important agricultural skills, particularly in rice production.” The slave trade developed in complexity as it grew in scale. Universities and colleges not only required their own endowments of land as sources of income and supplies, but also served to educate the leaders and administrators of the colonial settlements, who often became apologists for slavery. Wilder provides an excellent exploration of the role of the College of New Jersey and the Rev. John Witherspoon in the education of the leaders (James Madison and Patrick Henry, among many others) and their successors (John Marshall and James Monroe), who formulated the Indian Removal Act of 1830. His detailed elaboration of how Northern colleges spread the slave system into colonies like South Carolina and Georgia is equally thorough, and he also documents how race science took root in American academia.
A groundbreaking history that will no doubt contribute to a reappraisal of some deep-rooted founding myths.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59691-681-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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
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