A highly qualified historian offers a dense, sweeping history of a nation on the move.
A massive history of the striving, riven new nation that emerged from the Civil War, extending to the turn of the century.
As an integral piece of Oxford’s History of the United States series, this comprehensive volume by distinguished scholar White (American History/Stanford Univ.; Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, 2012, etc.), a MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow, portrays the United States at a significant crossroads. Would Americans embrace the common ideals of the recently deceased president, Abraham Lincoln, which formed a moral foundation for the future, or would the nation descend into political corruption, avaricious corporations, backlash against immigrants, and increasing class conflict? White delineates how both occurred. Lincoln’s Republican Party was transformed during these years of Reconstruction, splitting between the Radicals and laissez-faire liberals, essentially divided over how overbearing the federal government would be—yet all were committed to larger goals of nationalism, free labor, and contract freedom. While the Radicals were pushing for vigorous federal powers in the protection of freedmen’s rights, President Andrew Johnson, and the recalcitrant South, pushed back to maintain “a white man’s republic.” Meanwhile, the nation was exploding with the innovations of “tinkerers” and mass immigration into the country. The conquest of Native Americans was completed by their acculturation and assimilation, with the reservations governed by religious leaders who knew no more about administration than the military did. As an astute historian of the American West, White offers important scholarship on the “Greater Reconstruction”—i.e., conquering the West by bold federal policies like the railway acts and land grant legislation that created new infrastructure and schools and offered free farms for those able to work the land. At the same time, reformers pushed for enormously important social changes. Wage labor, wealth inequality, and immigration created class conflict that erupted in strikes in the late 1880s, while the concept of “home” took on new significance for whites and blacks alike.
A highly qualified historian offers a dense, sweeping history of a nation on the move.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-19-973581-5
Page Count: 928
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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