As Ransom acknowledges, counterfactual history is made up of “2 parts historical plausibility, 1 part common sense, 1 part...
An intriguing exercise in counterfactual history, operating under the assumption that the Confederate States of America did not, in fact, win the last election.
Imagine, Ransom (History and Economics/Univ. of California, Riverside) asks, that Robert E. Lee had not thrown George Pickett’s division into the line of battle at Gettysburg but had instead left the field. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia would not have been broken, and—Stonewall Jackson not having died either—it would have been on hand to contain Union intrusions into the South, and even to lob shells into Washington, D.C. The resultant military stalemate would have led to a profound change in government: “On November 8, 1864, Americans went to the polls and elected Horatio Seymour to be the seventeenth president of the United States.” All but unknown to actual history, the New York governor would have gone on to negotiate peace with the CSA, which in turn would have forged a powerful alliance with Great Britain. The two partners would then have carved up most of the Spanish empire in the Americas, including Cuba, while the imperial ambitions of the US would have been confined to the Pacific. Had the Confederacy endured, Ransom suggests, so would have slavery, at least for another decade or so, when persistently declining cotton prices would have forced a retooling of plantation economy. But civil rights are another matter; the North would not have welcomed freed slaves, “even if the Confederate landlords had been willing to part with their servile labor force,” and blacks might well have existed as serfs without the rights of citizens. And had there been two nations occupying the space of the former U.S., then there would have been a different tenor to the coming conflicts in Europe, the South allied with England, the North with Germany.
As Ransom acknowledges, counterfactual history is made up of “2 parts historical plausibility, 1 part common sense, 1 part imagination.” A pleasing application of the recipe.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-393-05967-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
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 Yorker staff 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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