An eye-opening, carefully argued exposé of what the author justifiably considers to be one of the big sleeper issues in...
Thomas Jefferson may have agonized privately over keeping slaves, writes Pulitzer-winning historian Wills, but he didn’t think twice about putting them to work defending the institution of slavery.
In this newsworthy account, Wills (James Madison, 2002, etc.) turns up a little-studied wrinkle in early constitutional history: the invention of “slave power” as a political tool. As Wills lays it out, Jefferson and several other southerners refused to ratify the Constitution until that document allowed slaves to be “represented” in Congress by some formula that accounted them as less than free whites, but that recognized their numbers nonetheless. Jefferson proposed three-quarters, northerners countered—none too willingly—with half, and in the end a compromise was reached that held that a slave was worth three-fifths of a white man for voting purposes. The effect, northern opponents such as Wills’s hero Timothy Pickering thundered, was that a southerner with a hundred slaves suddenly had sixty votes against a New England merchant’s one, which gave the South a decided edge in subsequent national politics and assured Jefferson’s election in 1800 (whence the sobriquet that gives Wills his title). That edge allowed the slave trade to endure, and it allowed Jefferson and Washington to locate the federal capital in an area surrounded by slaveholding states, further reinforcing the “peculiar institution.” Furthermore, the three-fifths proviso assured that new territories would be open to slavery, one reason that Jefferson worked to acquire Florida and Cuba for the US and negotiated the Louisiana Purchase, and one reason that his successors waged war against Mexico. Jefferson’s stately image comes in for a fair amount of reconsideration, and it’s clear from Wills’s pages that the sainted president wasn’t shy of using whatever means necessary to get his way. (Wills writes, for instance, “Like many of Jefferson’s accounts of past events, it gains in clarity by economizing on the truth.”)
An eye-opening, carefully argued exposé of what the author justifiably considers to be one of the big sleeper issues in American political history.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-618-34398-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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