A nuanced study of the illusory, troubling early arguments over emancipation and integration.
How the concept of “separate but equal” emerged from whites’ inability to envision full civil rights for blacks and Native Americans after emancipation.
The failed universal assertion that “all men are created equal” continues to haunt America’s history of racial relations. In this compelling work of wide research, Guyatt (History/Univ. of Cambridge; Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607-1876, 2007, etc.) delineates how the subtle arguments over colonization and removal were actually articulated by progressive reformers from the earliest era. Contradictions abound: while most early framers and “liberals” did generally believe in the Enlightenment notion that nonwhites could achieve their full potential when offered the proper environment, reformers could not get past what they saw as slavery’s “degradation” of the human condition, thus hindering blacks and Native Americans from being incorporated as full citizens. This “degradation” occurred from integration among whites—especially as Indians were continually pushed out of their land, corrupted by alcohol and treachery, and blacks were abused and ill-educated—and thus the happy ideal of “one nation only” began to give way to visions of separate colonies for nonwhites to keep them from being “ruined” by the majority. Guyatt points out how the War of 1812 brought home the “recognition among liberal Americans that the United States itself had become the obstacle to Indian advancement.” Moreover, despite early experiments, anti-slavery reformers such as missionaries and magazine editors could not stomach the thought of “amalgamation,” as was practiced in the South as an open secret. As a British historian, the author brings up some fascinating comparative examples—e.g., prominent reformer Granville Sharp’s efforts to establish a free-labor colony in Sierra Leone. As a popular solution to “the negro problem,” the influential American Colonization Society was supported by the most freethinking men of the day—e.g., James Monroe, the Marquis de Lafayette—yet it could not overcome fears of the social consequences of abolition.
A nuanced study of the illusory, troubling early arguments over emancipation and integration.Pub Date: April 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-465-01841-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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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