“Americans do not share a common memory of slavery,” write California State University, Fresno, historians Kytle (Romantic Reformers and the Antislavery Struggle in the Civil War Era, 2014) and Roberts (Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South, 2014) in this eye-opening history.
The authors point out the “whitewashed” and “unvarnished” versions of the American slavery story. The whitewashed version recalls benevolent masters and faithful slaves; the unvarnished describes the cruelties of enslavement. To recount the memory of slavery from its abolition in 1865 to now, the authors focus on Charleston, South Carolina, where the Civil War began at Fort Sumter and which became the “epicenter” of the Lost Cause gospel and longtime site of “Confederate veneration.” Making fine use of letters, diaries, and other sources, the authors offer a richly detailed, vivid re-creation of the entire era, showing how former slaveholders fostered romanticized antebellum memories while former slaves told the true story of slavery’s brutality. Tracing these conflicting narratives through Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, and recent years, the authors detail the roles played by the Charleston News and Courier, the Old Slave Mart Museum (long the only museum focused on American slavery, it argued slavery’s horrors were “greatly overstated”), and other institutions that made the city a “tourist mecca” after the Civil War, complete with visits to local gardens. “Few things troubled white southerners more than the notion that their ancestors had actively engaged in the sale of men, women, and children and facilitated the destruction of families,” write the authors. Those pressing for unvarnished memories countered a post–World War II campaign to “remove most traces of slavery” by providing black heritage tours, made slave spirituals part of the civil rights movement, and sought to memorialize Denmark Vesey, a former slave who planned a revolt in 1822 (and was honored with a statue in 2014). The authors note a “more truthful” memory of slavery has prevailed in Charleston since the early 2000s.
An important and fascinating examination of American slavery’s aftermath.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62097-365-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
Categories: CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | HISTORY | AFRICAN AMERICAN | UNITED STATES | ETHNICITY & RACE | GENERAL 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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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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