An unexpected source of historical insights.
A close look at July 4 orations.
Perl-Rosenthal, author of Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution (2015), opens in 1777 Boston, where a clergyman defends colonists’ decision to rebel and exhorts them to banish “tyranny as well as royalty out of the American states.” This was the first July 4 oration to appear in a pamphlet. During the next century, out of more than 100,000 that followed, about 2,500 of those published survive, and the author has read them all. Although few immortal words turned up, they revealed what patriotic Americans felt about their Revolution. At first, speakers emphasized the weakness of the colonies. Although no longer in charge, Britain remained hostile. The French Revolution proved a disappointment, and Napoleon turned out to be a frightening tyrant. Having fought Britain a second time, Americans felt more secure after 1820; speakers began celebrating their forefathers’ achievements while warning that their work was not completed. That the nation tolerated slavery always required explaining and soon became a painful controversy, ending, of course, in a Civil War that was far bloodier than the Revolution. There was no shortage of orators who proclaimed the Union victory “the completion of ‘a task to which the American people were sent, eighty-six years ago.”’ In reality, efforts to give formerly enslaved people full constitutional rights failed, and postwar July 4 orations lost their mass appeal. Except for a blip during the 1876 centennial, publications plummeted. After 1900, only speeches by presidents or other notable figures appeared in print. Perl-Rosenthal’s earnest epilogue concludes that our Revolution is still in progress, and an appendix contains half a dozen 19th-century orations whose fervor may amuse readers who will likely be grateful that they don’t have to sit through them.
An unexpected source of historical insights.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9781541606630
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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
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