Pure pleasure for Civil War buffs.
A lively account of the capital’s evolution from southern backwater to world center during the blood-soaked Civil War.
Former Baltimore Sun reporter Furgurson continues his series of closely observed Civil War histories (Not War But Murder: Cold Harbor 1864, 2000, etc.), charting the District of Columbia’s fortunes during the conflict. When newly elected Abraham Lincoln arrived in the capital in 1860, the city was sharply divided: “ . . . boisterous Republicans who called themselves ‘Wide-Awakes’ . . . had kept quiet until the last weeks of the presidential campaign. . . . Then, sure that history was with them, some 500 paraded openly, with a few blacks tagging along behind.” Against them were arrayed proslavery Democrats, for Washington was a decidedly southern town in geography and spirit, and “both Virginia and Maryland, the two states that enclose the capital on the Potomac, had rejected Lincoln by overwhelming margins.” When Lincoln also arrived, Furgurson writes, there were fewer than 500 federal troops in the capital, with most of the army thinly spread along the western frontier. This put the government at great risk during the inaugural days of secession—during which time Lincoln received plenty of death threats, some sounding eerily like that issued by John Wilkes Booth—and required the formation of volunteer militias. The government quickly attended to the southern leanings of the capital by requiring all officeholders to swear an oath of loyalty to the government, then declared martial law; in the exchange, the mayor of Washington was jailed for refusing to swear allegiance. The remaking of the city continued throughout the war so that, Furgurson writes, “Washington would be more than a meeting place for delegates from states with notions of their own sovereignty; Lincoln had made it the seat of a forceful central government. Henceforth the world would say that the United States is, not are, a power among nations—its name transformed by war into a singular noun.”
Pure pleasure for Civil War buffs.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-40454-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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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