A useful and well-prepared addition to the scholarly research on pre–Civil War Southern planters.
These historical letters to and from a young North Carolina man shed light on the education and development of an antebellum planter.
Tristrim “Trim” Lowther Skinner (1820-1862) was the well-educated only son of Edenton, North Carolina, planter Joseph Blount Skinner (1781-1851). At age 20, Trim took over management of his father’s enterprises. He served in the North Carolina General Assembly from 1846 to 1848, married Eliza Fisk Harwood (1827-1888) in 1849, and died in the Civil War as a Confederate captain in the 1st North Carolina Infantry Regiment. These collected letters begin when 13-year-old Trim was at boarding schools in North Carolina and Philadelphia, continuing through his college years and beyond as he became more seriously involved in farming and other business concerns; the letters end soon after his marriage. As she has in similar volumes, Maillard (The Belles of Williamsburg, 2015, etc.) offers a scholarly and well-researched collection of letters from the Skinner Family Papers housed in the Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, supported by a full scholarly apparatus including notes, bibliography, and index. Through these letters, readers learn in detail how a planter—and how a future Confederate officer—was made. Trim’s youthful curriculum sounds daunting: “I recite a lesson in Tacitus—one in philosophy—one in geography and one in greek,” [sic] writes 15-year-old Trim of his morning routine. He also reports on a duel in college that ended, somewhat ignominiously, without either party receiving much injury despite using guns and “3 or 4 pistols.” But Greek and dueling are put aside, and Trim’s adult letters chiefly reflect his close interest in crops, weather, and illness. In a typically detailed 1847 letter, he tells his father: “The worms have injured the stand of corn a good deal, and there is a long (1 1/2 inch) black caterpillar with smooth skin still at work.” The portrait that emerges is one of a hardworking manager always worried about crop prices, with little time for sipping mint juleps.
A useful and well-prepared addition to the scholarly research on pre–Civil War Southern planters.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 481
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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