Interesting reading for students of cultural history as well as Spanish-American relations over the centuries.
From Hispanophilia to Hispanophobia: a well-considered study of the shifting but, in its main outlines, surprisingly constant view of American elites toward the Spanish Other.
American culture has been bound up with Spanish, Spanish-American, and Hispanic cultures for far longer than the matter of Donald Trump and his wall, although that ugly business is just a reverberation from and continuation of the past. As Kagan (Emeritus, History/Johns Hopkins Univ.; Clio and the Crown: The Politics of History in Medieval and Early Modern Spain, 2009, etc.) recounts in this scholarly study, Henry Adams, William Randolph Hearst, and a host of other influential Americans advanced the “Black Legend” of “the Spain of bloodthirsty conquistadors who slaughtered their way across the Americas” and otherwise contrasted Spanish civilization to the infinitely more enlightened—in their telling—Anglo-Saxon one. Against them were writers such as Washington Irving, who told tales of a sunny Spain, “a light-hearted, quasi-Oriental country that was charming, hospitable, and, most important, relentlessly romantic and picturesque.” William Dean Howells, for his part, called the Spanish “the honestest people in Europe,” leaving it to the likes of Ernest Hemingway to tell his compatriots that not all of them were top-notch fellows; even after the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway could be persuaded to go to Franco’s nation to catch a glimpse of his beloved bullfight. Kagan carefully documents changing attitudes over three centuries of Anglo-American interaction with Spain and its colonial descendants, attitudes that hinge on stereotypes good and bad, from Zorro to the Inquisition and Dolores del Río to Valeriano Weyler. Occasionally, the author even turns the tables, as when he notes that Hearst was broadly considered little more than a looter of Spanish culture "whose seemingly unquenchable appetite for Spanish art and antiques resulted in wholesale ‘destruction’ of Spain’s artistic and architectural patrimony,” just as Americans of many generations have appropriated things Spanish and Hispanic.
Interesting reading for students of cultural history as well as Spanish-American relations over the centuries.Pub Date: March 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4962-0772-2
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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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