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MR. JEFFERSON’S LOST CAUSE

Name: MR. JEFFERSON’S LOST CAUSE
Author: Roger G. Kennedy
ISBN: 0-19-515347-2

LAND, FARMERS, SLAVERY, AND THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE

by Roger G. Kennedy ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2003

Fresh, endlessly fascinating, and altogether extraordinary.

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A sweeping, continent-wide reinterpretation of early US history from Kennedy (Burr, Hamilton, and Jefferson, 1999, etc.), who replaces individualist heroes such as Daniel Boone with economic movements, transcontinental forces, and unintended consequences.

For example, writes the former director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Thomas Jefferson envisioned a nation of yeomen, landholding farmers. What he got—what he allowed, in fact—was a corporatist country of plantation owners beholden to the hated England. When Napoleon arranged for Jefferson’s purchase of the vast Louisiana territory in 1803—a sale he was not legally authorized to make, nor Jefferson to accept—his aim was to assure American dominion over the interior of North America, thus thwarting English efforts to keep a flanking presence on the Mississippi River. What happened, though, was that Jefferson, for puzzling reasons that do not reflect well on him, allowed fellow members of the slaveholding planter class that dominated early American politics to dictate the terms of settlement in the new lands of the Louisiana Purchase, thereby rendering his vision of a land settled by smallholders and eventually absent of slavery all but impossible—and, in the bargain, sowing the seeds of civil war. Kennedy offers a portrait that replaces nation-states with contending corporate forces: “There were more non-Americans fighting for American independence at Yorktown,” he writes, “than native-born, and only a minority of the opposing troops under the command of Cornwallis were born in England,” while the Spanish and even Indian nations were congeries of many ethnicities bonded by ever shifting alliances. Thematically rich and full of subtle arguments, Kennedy’s study forces a reconsideration of accepted views. It couldn’t come at a better time, given the soon-to-be widely commemorated bicentenary of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Fresh, endlessly fascinating, and altogether extraordinary.

Pub Date: March 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-19-515347-2

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Oxford Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002

Categories:

HISTORY | UNITED STATES | GENERAL HISTORY

- BOOK REVIEW
BURR, HAMILTON AND JEFFERSON
by Roger G. Kennedy

- BOOK REVIEW
HIDDEN CITIES
by Roger G. Kennedy

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ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN

by Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 18, 1974

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Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."

Pub Date: June 18, 1974

ISBN: 0671894412

Page Count: 372

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
PERIL
by Bob Woodward & Robert Costa

- BOOK REVIEW
RAGE
by Bob Woodward

- BOOK REVIEW
FEAR
by Bob Woodward

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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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.