Excellent survey of North America’s early history, with an emphasis on Indigenous peoples.
A 10-volume Oxford History of United States gets off to a fine start.
Mancall, a historian at the University of Southern California, points out that Europeans looked on Columbus’ New World as a “vacant, pristine wilderness.” Jaws may drop when he adds that it contained as many residents as Europe, more than 50 million people, and was dense with farms, towns, cultures, commerce, and civilizations that rose and vanished. After a nod to the Vikings, he summarizes European experience in the centuries after Columbus, dominated by Spain, which focused on Central and South America and the West Indies as well as emphasized exploitation over settlement. As citizens of Europe’s superpower, the French preferred to stay home. Despite occupying half of North America for two centuries after Columbus, only 70,000 were present when the British, a million strong, took over in 1763. Unlike rulers of Spain and Portugal, English monarchs hated spending government money on New World settlements, so theirs were privately financed commercial ventures. One third of the way into his long book, Mancall enters familiar territory: the settling of the Atlantic coast beginning with Roanoke in the 1570s (a disaster), Jamestown in 1607 (a horror for the first years; almost everyone died), and the Pilgrims in 1620 Massachusetts (they suffered greatly but, deeply pious, believed it was God’s plan). Nearly 500 pages describing 17th century North America deliver far more details than school history texts—and in far superior prose. Ending in 1680 seems arbitrary, until the author emphasizes that, around this period, Indigenous cultures were caught up in bloody uprisings. Indigenous peoples still vastly outnumbered Europeans, but Mancall makes a case that these events marked the tipping point when Europeans began moving into the interior in force, a process taken up in succeeding volumes.
Excellent survey of North America’s early history, with an emphasis on Indigenous peoples.Pub Date: June 1, 2026
ISBN: 9780195372786
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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
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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