A deeply researched, generously illustrated perspective on antebellum America.
Historical study of how the nation’s iconography inspired patriotism and rebellion.
Clavin, a professor of history, argues persuasively that the nation’s iconic national symbols and images fueled and shaped slave and anti-slavery resistance before the Civil War. “For enslaved people and their allies,” he writes, the American flag, Fourth of July celebrations, and language of the founding documents “justified and inspired revolutionary violence in the pursuit of two interconnected objectives—the death of slavery and the birth of a new and truly egalitarian nation.” Both slave uprisings and abolitionist movements were motivated not only by the cruelty and inhumanity inherent in enslaving men, women, and children, but by the existence of slavery as “the ultimate symbolic betrayal of American freedom.” Images of the slave trade being carried out in front of the Capitol, with the flag proudly waving, appeared in anti-slavery publications. Fourth of July celebrations, likewise, seemed blatantly hypocritical: In some Southern states, slave auctions were held on that date, while elsewhere in the South, pro-slavery Whites tried to strip the holiday of its political meaning, “making the holiday a carnival of food, drink, and entertainment, rather than a celebration of revolutionary people, events, and ideas.” Clavin reports that many instances of escapes and uprisings occurred on the holiday grounded most famously in American values. On July 5, 1852, the escaped slave and acclaimed orator Frederick Douglass delivered a rousing two-hour speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” in which he underscored American exceptionalism as aspirational, offering a plan “for the republic’s redemption,” if it lived up to its claim of liberty and equality for all. Yet others—such as David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet—justified their call for violent slave resistance by citing the revolutionary Declaration of Independence, which affirmed “both the right and duty of Americans to overthrow their oppressors” and to ensure justice for all.
A deeply researched, generously illustrated perspective on antebellum America.Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9781479823246
Page Count: 304
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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