Professor Hofstadter, who died in 1970, intended this to be the first section of a three-volume "general interpretive synthesis of the findings of the past generation of professional historians" in American studies, to quote his proposal to the publisher. Modeled on Halevy's England in 1815, the overview moves, not through narrative, but back and forth from the particular to the conceptual and quantitative general. As social history the book is excellent. Its subjects are population and immigration, white and black servitude, the churches, religious life, and the Great Awakening, and, under the heading "The Middle-Class World," the socio-economic character and direction of the colonies at mid-century. The chapter on immigration and population is extremely well done with its emphases on the character of the labor force, on land tenure systems, and on economic development. What Hofstadter calls "the anguish of the early American experience" is delineated in the chapters on servitude: in 1750 the largest stream of new Americans was black slaves. What he terms "a middle-class society governed for the most part by its upper classes" is examined with a sure grasp of regional differences and, again, a valuable emphasis on economic relationships (the flow of rural surplus, land speculation, international trade). The class conflicts and the reluctant impulse to independence of the 70's are left unspecified: had Hofstadter written his chapter on colonial politics perhaps this would not be the case. The most detailed section deals with religion, the "huge body of religious indifferents," and the Awakening (which is insufficiently related to conjunctural developments). Throughout Hofstadter insinuates the European origins and counterparts of secularism, indenture, the Awakening, indeed the whole bloom of Protestant nationalist capitalism. As he intended, both "students of history at various levels" and "the general educated public" will gain much from Hofstadter's appreciation of the rich, liberated aspects of the "unregulated bourgeois order" and his stress on the fact that it was "a harsh world for those without land, skill, and freedom." Had he never written anything else, we would greatly regret his loss.
Pub Date: Oct. 22, 1971
ISBN: 0394717953
Page Count: -
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1971
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.
Jackie Kennedy's secret service agent Hill and co-author McCubbin team up for a follow-up to Mrs. Kennedy and Me (2012) in this well-illustrated narrative of those five days 50 years ago when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Since Hill was part of the secret service detail assigned to protect the president and his wife, his firsthand account of those days is unique. The chronological approach, beginning before the presidential party even left the nation's capital on Nov. 21, shows Kennedy promoting his “New Frontier” policy and how he was received by Texans in San Antonio, Houston and Fort Worth before his arrival in Dallas. A crowd of more than 8,000 greeted him in Houston, and thousands more waited until 11 p.m. to greet the president at his stop in Fort Worth. Photographs highlight the enthusiasm of those who came to the airports and the routes the motorcades followed on that first day. At the Houston Coliseum, Kennedy addressed the leaders who were building NASA for the planned moon landing he had initiated. Hostile ads and flyers circulated in Dallas, but the president and his wife stopped their motorcade to respond to schoolchildren who held up a banner asking the president to stop and shake their hands. Hill recounts how, after Lee Harvey Oswald fired his fatal shots, he jumped onto the back of the presidential limousine. He was present at Parkland Hospital, where the president was declared dead, and on the plane when Lyndon Johnson was sworn in. Hill also reports the funeral procession and the ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery. “[Kennedy] would have not wanted his legacy, fifty years later, to be a debate about the details of his death,” writes the author. “Rather, he would want people to focus on the values and ideals in which he so passionately believed.”
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3149-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.
A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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