An enlightening scholarly study of American Indian history that gets at the root tensions underlying the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee.
Why were the Americans so concerned about the Ghost Dance religion practiced so enthusiastically by the Lakota Sioux and other Great Plains tribes in the 1880s? In this astute new appraisal, Warren (Western U.S. History/Univ. of California, Davis; Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody and the Wild West Show, 2005, etc.) finds in this religion—based on messianic visions by a northern Paiute in Nevada named Wovoka—a shred of hope for Indians denuded of their ancestral power and land, herded into reservations, and stripped of their ability to live by the hunting-and-gathering methods of their elders. The dance took elements of Christianity, such as the messiah figure, and wove them into a joyful communion involving movement and visions of horses and buffalo. Though the dancers could become frenzied and fall unconscious, Warren insists that it was essentially a peaceful dance, stressing harmony within this jagged new age of American industry, wage work, and deracination. However, many Americans—since Indians were not considered citizens until 1924, Warren does not include Indians as Americans here—felt threatened by the dances and banned the gatherings as being warlike, leading to the tragic misunderstanding between the military and hundreds of Lakota at the Pine Ridge Reservation in late 1890. Yet unlike the conclusions by authors and historians such as Dee Brown, author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Warren does not see the Ghost Dance as the death knell of Indian history or spirituality but rather the beginning of Indians’ attempt to live and adapt to a strange new world in which literacy was necessary and industrial capitalism was the driving economic force. Warren also looks at the work of anthropologist James Mooney, who chronicled the passing of “authentic” Indian ways during this era by first studying the Ghost Dance.
Though it may be too academic for some readers, this is an eye-opening work of American history.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-465-01502-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Basic
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
Categories: HISTORY | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | UNITED STATES | GENERAL HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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