A well-documented history of Confederate monuments and the conflicting views they inspire.
A chronicle of the effort to erect and protect or remove Confederate statues or other monuments.
Cox, a historian of the American South, estimates that several hundred monuments to the Confederacy exist in cemeteries, town squares, and other public spaces, and many have faced political and legal challenges in recent years. In this engrossing social history, the author writes that while these memorials began with an impulse to remember the dead, the United Daughters of the Confederacy soon began using them to promote the so-called “Lost Cause” view that in the Civil War, the South fought not for slavery but for states’ rights. Cox follows changes that have occurred since Reconstruction in the stances of friends and foes of the monuments, including Black activists whose opposition grew during the civil rights era and gained further momentum during recent protests centered on Confederate battle flags or statues of Robert E. Lee in cities such as Charleston, New Orleans, Charlottesville, and Richmond. The author argues that such monuments and symbols, like flags, are not harmless throwbacks: “They are weapons in the larger arsenal of white supremacy, artifacts of Jim Crow not unlike the ‘whites only’ signs that declared black southerners to be second-class citizens.” For such reasons, Cox makes an implicit case for removing monuments from publicly funded spaces without reconciling that position with her view that monuments are “essentially, a local problem” and decisions about them should be made by “a cross-section of community stakeholders.” She suggests no compromises that might work if residents of a community disagree on removal—there may be “no common ground” among people for whom monuments represent “competing visions of history.” Nonetheless, this clear and thorough account, essential for Southern libraries, is likely to become a standard reference work on its subject.
A well-documented history of Confederate monuments and the conflicting views they inspire.Pub Date: April 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4696-6267-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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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