A deeply researched work that exposes the shameful legacy of the neo-Confederacy, one that lingers to this day.
A broad-ranging study of anti-Black violence in the Reconstruction era.
Reconstruction was not so much a failure as an effort that was sabotaged from the outset. The administration of Andrew Johnson was committed to White supremacy, and the Confederates, though militarily defeated, never really surrendered. Immediately after the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan was founded, and “night riders” began visiting violence on Black Americans who dared press for civil and economic rights. As historian Williams shows, these visits were carefully coordinated, indicating some sort of central organization as opposed to the commonly held belief that they were impromptu and rare attacks. The attacks “frequently targeted prosperous Black people,” seizing income-producing tools and even whole crops. In some instances, as Williams chronicles, Black people organized resistance, and the night riders tended accordingly to steer clear of situations where they were likely to face gunfire. “Yet even within a limited space to operate, right-wingers committed extensive atrocities,” she adds. Because they demanded total domination over Southern society, another understandable Black response was to move, as happened in the Deep South in 1879, “a hurried, mass movement of significant numbers in months” on the part of people called Exodusters, with Kansas gaining 30,000 Black migrants almost overnight. A combination of anti-Black violence, economic disenfranchisement, and voter suppression—all of which lend this book an altogether timely feel—doomed efforts to make Black Southerners equal citizens. Too many historians, Williams observes, have brushed such matters aside, blaming the failure of Reconstruction on its Northern champions, but Black Southerners did not forget, and many of the testimonials and eyewitness accounts that she draws on come from field recordings from the 1930s—even though, as she concludes, “Black counter-histories of atrocity and betrayal were no match for the machinery of the Lost Cause.” Pair this book with Margaret A. Burnham’s By Hands Now Known.
A deeply researched work that exposes the shameful legacy of the neo-Confederacy, one that lingers to this day.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9781635576634
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
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 Yorker staff 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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