A well-written, noteworthy contribution to African-American history.
An illuminating account of the free “Afro-Virginians” who lived and worked in a society and economy dominated by slavery.
“I tremble for my country,” Thomas Jefferson famously remark, “when I reflect that God is just.” Jefferson’s cousin Richard Randolph felt much the same way, and before he died in 1796 he left instructions to emancipate his slaves, begging their forgiveness for his part in the “infamous practice of usurping the rights of our fellow creatures, equally entituled [sic] with ourselves to the enjoyment of Liberty and happiness.” Randolph was not the only emancipator of his day and place, writes Ely (History and Black Studies/College of William and Mary; The Adventures of Amos ’n’ Andy, 1991). Indeed, freed slaves such as Sam White were unusual but not rare; Ely notes that one in eight black Virginians were free in the generation before the Civil War. Ely traces the histories of Sam White, Syphax Brown, Hercules White, Billy Ellis, and their descendants, who banded together to buy and hold the rich farmlands of Israel Hill in Prince Edward Country, then as now a fertile breadbasket. As well as agriculture, they engaged in many trades, including transport, brickmaking, masonry, and carpentry; for, as Ely notes, “paradoxically, to defend and enhance their independence, free blacks had to assert their rights within the white-run institutions under which they lived—and they had to take part in the local economy.” In time they came to form an important part of Virginia’s skilled workforce, laboring alongside whites and usually receiving equal pay. Though their existence in a slaveholding “society whose infinite capacity to oppress differentiates it utterly from our own” was fraught with tension and, Ely warns, can hardly be characterized as friendly, particularly as the Civil War loomed, these free communities and people endured in Virginia, with many of their descendants becoming important figures in the post–Civil War era.
A well-written, noteworthy contribution to African-American history.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2004
ISBN: 0-679-44738-5
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
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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