A brief, crisp account of ``the Pentecost of Politics'' that energized farmers in America's heartland in the last third of the 19th century. Historians have generally regard this agrarian movement from three vantage points: as a forerunner of Progressive reforms (John Hicks); as a failed attempt to create a more humane economic order (C. Vann Woodward and Lawrence Goodwyn); or as a dark expression of latent anti-intellectual and intolerant impulses in the American character (Richard Hofstadter). McMath (History/Georgia Institute of Technology) has created a reasonable argument that incorporates some elements of all of these views. Although finding that many Populists shared the prevailing prejudices of the time against blacks and women, he argues that this political upsurge ``fashioned a space within which Americans could begin to imagine alternative futures shaped in the promise of equal rights.'' Recent research at the state and local levels not only enables the author to critique previous historians of Populism but also to demonstrate the bewildering variety of regional differences in the South, Midwest, and West that complicated Populism's organizing efforts. McMath is especially helpful in analyzing the economic pressures, the community activities, and the ``cultures of protest'' from which sprang the Farmers' Alliance and its later, more famous offshoot, the People's Party. True, his treatment of the free silver issue that William Jennings Bryan rode to fame seems offhand, and he doesn't weigh adequately the Populists' role in passing reform legislation. But he does show how the movement tried—though ultimately failed—to make common cause with other reform groups such as labor, suffragettes, prohibitionists, and, most tragically, southern blacks, who were as victimized as poor whites by the sharecropping system. A rewarding examination of how a protest movement was fanned into being, only to flame out.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8090-7796-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1992
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
