A mixed bag of modern historical essays and contemporary journalistic accounts of the 1930s Dust Bowl. Perhaps the greatest environmental disaster to befall the US, the so-called Dust Bowl, resulted from poor farming practices, livestock overgrazing, and drought. “In its narrowest technical sense,” the editors write, “the term Dust Bowl refers only to a small district with reddish-brown soils in northeastern New Mexico, southeastern Colorado, southwestern Kansas, and the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma during the 1930s.” Yet, thanks to the writings of John Steinbeck and the photographs of Dorothea Lange, among other chroniclers, the image of the Dust Bowl spread to cover a much greater area as a dominant Depression image. With the arrival of the Dust Bowl, formerly productive topsoil floated off on the winds for hundreds of miles in all directions, forcing rural Americans already hard hit by economic disaster to abandon their farms and make for the cities or, in the case of the “Okies,” for the fields and orchards of California. As several of the newspaper and magazine accounts included in this volume attest, the exiles did not always leave easily. In Nebraska, for example, writes Lief Dahl in the New Republic of January 18, 1933, displaced field hands formed a leftist “Farmers’ Holiday movement” to battle bank foreclosures, while Margaret Bourke-White, writing for the Nation, describes the untoward sight of Kansas farmers feeding tumbleweeds to their starving cattle. The journalism included in this volume is of a very high quality, politically charged and historically rich. The historical interpretations are less interesting, unless you happen to have a passion for statistics on Protestant church memberships in Haskell County, Kan., circa 1936. Still, a useful resource compiled by three academics for students of American history, particularly concerning the rise of the populist political movement. (8 b&w photos, 2 line drawings, 13 maps, not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-87081-507-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Univ. Press of Colorado
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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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. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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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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