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ABOLITION!

THE STRUGGLE TO ABOLISH SLAVERY IN THE BRITISH COLONIES

Students of history will value this well-balanced survey.

Appearing on the bicentenary of Parliament’s Abolition Act, which halted British involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, Reddie’s accessible and sensitive overview traces the history of African enslavement, specifically in the West Indies.

This slim but thorough study presents an astonishing amount of information, from a brief look at African civilizations before the Europeans arrived through the mid-19th-century scramble to colonize and exploit the continent after emancipation. There is a great deal of history to wade through before the Quakers declared their opposition to slavery by the late 18th century. Reddie credits Christopher Columbus with initiating the transatlantic slave trade, while unscrupulous Plymouth-born merchant John Hawkins, who led an expedition party in what is now Sierra Leone to seize 300 Africans in 1562, became one of the first English slave traders. Although England was slow to accrue islands in the West Indies, it joined the lucrative trade in “sub-human” cargo with the establishment of the Royal African Company (RAC) in 1672, helping to turn Bristol and Liverpool into major slaving centers. Slave trading became respectable, and the author points out how many illustrious personages were deeply conflicted over it. Events that profoundly influenced the abolitionist cause included the violent slave revolt in St. Domingue (Haiti), the American War of Independence and the deliberate drowning of 133 Africans aboard the British slaver Zong in 1781. Quaker leader Thomas Fowell Buxton and Methodist John Wesley denounced slavery as inhuman, as did feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft. Activists Granville Sharp, freed slave Olaudah Equiano, Thomas Clarkson and MP William Wilberforce, among many others, fought against it tirelessly. Reddie examines the passive role of the Anglican church, the troubling subject of African collusion in slave trafficking and the horrors of the Middle Passage, and he helps correct some fallacies concerning slavery’s legacy.

Students of history will value this well-balanced survey.

Pub Date: March 1, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-7459-5229-1

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Lion/Trafalgar

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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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