by Jeremy Black ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 3, 2015
Black’s academic style can drag readers down in certain dry and wordy sections. However, his scholarly outlook on history...
A dense study of counterfactualism and its use in the practice of history.
The method of examining past events with the knowledge of the circumstances that affected decisions is a powerful tool to understanding what happened. Seeing the uncertainty, the “unknown knowns,” and outside forces that affected historical incidents help us divine why things happened as they did—as well as what might have been. Black (History/Univ. of Exeter; The Power of Knowledge: How Information and Technology Made the Modern World, 2014, etc.) asserts that counterfactualism is more pronounced in Anglophone nations than in those cultures without the freedom to question definitive histories. Even so, he explores and explains its use and the approach to history in cultures as varied as the Mongols, Chinese, Muslims, Ottoman Turks, Finns, and Danes. Readers will need a background in world history, as the author cites battles and wars over the last two millennia. There is a long and interesting chapter on the rise of the West and how Europe took precedence in world affairs. Black explains that assertive, definitive history quells debate, and its need to explain all serves only to mislead. It is better to know the role of the individuals involved, the timing of significant events, and the short- and long-term effects of a counterfactual. Certain disciplines do not respond well to counterfactuals—e.g., social history since it affects too broad a cast. It is more appropriate and useful for military and political history and a boon for teaching. The author’s illustrative examples of “what if,” “how,” and “why” will make readers sit back and wonder—the whole point of counterfactuals.
Black’s academic style can drag readers down in certain dry and wordy sections. However, his scholarly outlook on history today, its ambiguity and uncertainty, the need of analyzing, interpreting, and reinterpreting events, makes it well worth fighting through slow patches to appreciate his extensive store of knowledge.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-253-01704-8
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979
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
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by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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