Joseph successfully links episodes in the struggle for civil rights to form a continuum of injustice and resolution.
A noted scholar of political history offers a hopeful vision of a future in which Black Americans take their places as full, equal citizens of the U.S.
Joseph, founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the University of Texas, provocatively links the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection to the anti-Black violence of the Reconstruction era, a time of entrenched Jim Crow policies, which, he reminds readers, was not confined to the South. That first Reconstruction period was followed by a second, in his reckoning, which expanded from Brown v. Board of Education to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The third, which began with the election of Barack Obama, is “the most volatile yet.” By Joseph’s account, the White nationalism espoused by Donald Trump and those rioters hinges on two lies: “The first is that Black people are not human beings. The second is that the first lie never happened.” One need not be a far right-winger to embrace “redemptionist” rhetoric that imposes school segregation in the name of “parental choice” and voter suppression in the name of election security. Of course, the Trumpian backlash against the Obama years was grounded in “white nostalgia over the nation’s regime of racial slavery and grievance over that system’s demise.” Each era of reconstruction has brought renewed violence by those who insist on White supremacy, most recently as exemplified by the police murder of George Floyd and countless other Black Americans. Through joint actions with feminists, gay rights activists, other oppressed minorities, and allies, Black people have been able to assert their rights anew with the Black Lives Matter movement, bringing new vigor to the dismantling of redemptionist racism and resistance against “racial segregation, exploitation, and death”—a cause that, the author argues, can reach its goals within our lifetime.
Joseph successfully links episodes in the struggle for civil rights to form a continuum of injustice and resolution.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-541-60074-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
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
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