A scholarly study that is also gripping drama.
Historian Shultz (Veil of Fear, Fear Itself, not reviewed) reconstructs the cultural forces surrounding an 1834 riot that destroyed a convent school in Charlestown, Massachusetts.
Between 1826 and 1834, the Charlestown Ursuline Academy was an elegant boarding school catering to the daughters of Boston’s Protestant aristocracy. In keeping with the Ursuline mandate to teach young women, the Academy offered an education that was unusually rigorous and creative for the time. The author documents the school’s curriculum in meticulous detail, emphasizing its innovative instructional techniques (which included collaborative learning, hands-on experimentation, and constructive rather than punitive disciplinary measures). Well-bred, elegant, and authoritative Ursuline sisters, led by the formidable Mary Ann Moffatt, offered refreshing role models for their students. But the Academy also provoked the ill will of its neighbors in the working-class Charlestown section of Boston, as much on account of the privilege it symbolized, and the intimidating independence of the women who directed it, as because of anti-Catholic prejudice. With painstaking scholarship and stylish, vivid description, Schultz traces the series of events that fanned the smoldering resentment into frenzy. The deadly cholera epidemic of 1832 exacerbated mistrust of the impoverished Irish population of Boston, and by extension, of the Catholic churches that they attended. More damaging still, a former student named Rebecca Reed penned a lurid expose, Six Months in a Convent, in which she claimed that students and novices were imprisoned and tormented by the nuns. Although an investigative committee that visited the Academy found no evidence of any coercion or abuse, the charismatic Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher embarked on a series of anti-Catholic lectures. On a hot night in August 1834, the hostility culminated in a series of riots in which mobs torched the school, leaving the building and its gardens in ruins. While Schultz does not quite succeed in substantiating her claim that “the story of this riot . . . remains the story of today’s America,” the timely resonances of the tale matter less than the author’s ability to bring the past to life.
A scholarly study that is also gripping drama.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-85685-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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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