A convincing demonstration of the close links between capitalism and the unconscionable trade in human beings.
A tale of money and enslavement on the streets of New York.
In the early 19th century, writes historian Wells, New York was the Northern city most closely aligned with the slave states and the institution of slavery, “due in large part to the lucrative trade between Manhattan banks and insurance companies and the slaveholders of the cotton South.” Where many Northerners refused to follow the demands of the Fugitive Slave Act, it was big business for a group that abolitionist David Ruggles called the New York Kidnapping Club, “a powerful and far-reaching collection of police officers, political authorities, judges, lawyers, and slave traders who terrorized the city’s black residents throughout the early nineteenth century.” Members of the club thought nothing of dispatching freeborn Black New Yorkers to the South to be impressed into slavery. Black children in particular often disappeared from the streets only to turn up on plantations in the South—and later in Cuba and other international slave markets. The work of the kidnappers was made easier by a corrupt police department—and at one point two corrupt and competing police forces—and the fact that both sides of Manhattan were lined with wharves filled with ships that came and went. The author populates his pages with characters who are little known to history, such as the city’s recorder, Richard Riker, who “for nearly thirty years on behalf of southern slaveholding claimants sent untold numbers of people into bondage.” Small wonder that when he died, the newspapers of Charleston and New Orleans published obituaries. Ruggles should also be better known. The narrative suffers from a certain sluggishness and needless rhetorical flourishes—“As the train gained momentum on its tracks, Ruggles took his seat, hopeful that the momentum to end slavery was finally gaining steam among the hectic citizens of the northeast”—but it’s a story that deserves to be told.
A convincing demonstration of the close links between capitalism and the unconscionable trade in human beings.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-56858-752-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bold Type Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
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
An inspiration for those fighting for democratic rights in the face of authoritarianism.
A spirited history of homegrown noncompliance.
There’s the history we know, and then, below that iceberg’s tip, all that we don’t. Stoermer, a public historian and teacher, does yeoman work in digging up stories that are far from the “safe, sanitized, often nationalistic version of the past.” Early on in his narrative, for example, come complex events out of early colonial New England. First is the revolt of Indigenous peoples led by the sachem Metacomet, a revolt that blossomed into “proportionally, the deadliest war in American history for the colonials,” one that textbooks would prefer to forget in favor of rosy stories of the first Thanksgiving. A decade later follows the not-unconnected Salem witchcraft trials, met by dissenters called the Unconfessed, who refused to accept the inquisitors’ assertions of heresy and sorcery, rebuking “a state that demanded its citizens validate its lies.” Given the flood of lies that inundates the country today, their resistance is a particularly valuable lesson. Almost unknown outside specialist circles is Stoermer’s account of the so-called Six, abolitionists who, prosperous and influential, “had accepted that tactical violence was necessary” in resisting slavery, financing, and otherwise supporting John Brown’s rebellion. Their story does not end happily; when the bullets flew, most of them withdrew. Throughout, Stoermer draws lessons to offer by way of a primer for today’s dissenters—for instance, “When systematic oppression operates at scale, resistance needs people who can build sophisticated infrastructure,” and, in doing so, who can contribute to a machinery of resistance to combat the machinery of the state. Usefully, he also reminds readers that even in defeat can come victory of sorts, as with the anti-Federalists who demanded that the Constitution contain amendments that “would later be used to challenge Jim Crow, expand civil rights, and protect individual liberty against state power.”
An inspiration for those fighting for democratic rights in the face of authoritarianism.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9781586424367
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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