An expert addition to the boundless literature surrounding Washington and the founding era.
The first president’s role in creating his eponymous city.
Historian Watson reminds readers that the Constitution granted Congress the power to create a national capital. However, from the first meeting in 1789, controversy over the location was fierce. Washington, writes the author, “grumbled” that it was causing “ ‘more bitterness, more sectional divisiveness and more commentary by participants’ than any other issue, including slavery.” Watson joins fellow historians in praising the “Compromise of 1790,” which broke the logjam. With Washington’s approval, Alexander Hamilton sought a federal government that could assume the states’ war debts and establish a national bank. Thomas Jefferson and the anti-Federalists hated the ideas. In exchange for dropping their opposition, Hamilton agreed to use his influence for a Potomac capital. The author ably describes the tumultuous process that followed, a tale that will be familiar to readers well versed in other grand projects like the Panama Canal or Transcontinental Railroad. Historians extol the design of Washington’s chosen architect, Pierre L’Enfant, but he was so obnoxious that everyone approved his dismissal after a year. The Founding Fathers, brilliant in so many ways, agreed that taxes were unnecessary and that selling lots in the new city would pay for everything. The result was two decades of pleas for loans, unpaid bills, and construction delays. Working conditions were brutal, and America possessed few skilled craftsmen, so builders imported workers from Europe and eventually used a great deal of slave labor (“cruelly inevitable”). By the time John Adams took up residence in November 1800, the White House roof was partially completed. Furthermore, “only a third of the nearby Capitol was nearing completion, temporary shanty homes dotted the landscape, and construction equipment littered the grounds of the unfinished buildings.” Matters improved, but it took another decade. Washington’s final battle turned out to be unexpectedly difficult, and Watson makes a strong argument that only his astute leadership assured victory.
An expert addition to the boundless literature surrounding Washington and the founding era.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-62616-784-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Georgetown Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
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
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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