edited by Ted Widmer with Clay Risen & George Kalogerakis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 3, 2016
An excellent teaching tool, perfect for libraries.
Noted academics, scholars, editors, and historians contribute to a collection of fresh, provocative essays on the Civil War, first published in digital form by the New York Times.
Times’ editors Risen (American Whiskey, Bourbon & Rye: A Guide to the Nation's Favorite Spirit, 2015, etc.) and Kalogerakis team up with Widmer (Director, John Carter Brown Library/Brown Univ.; Brown: The History of an Idea, 2015, etc.) for a beautifully laid-out and organized version of their online Disunion blog, which ran until 2015. Featuring a foreword by Ken Burns, who speaks to the persistent relevance of the Civil War as an initial but never satisfactory way of atoning for our original sin, the book elicits contemporary voices wrestling with internal conflicts that still haunt Americans today: as Widmer writes, “anger at the federal government, unresolved racial tensions, simple helplessness before the constant onslaught of a 24-7 communications grid that matured during the war.” Each of the 10 chapters contains around 10 essays, from the first chapter, “Secession” (e.g., “The Strange Victory of the Palmetto State” by Manisha Sinha), to “The Battlefield” (e.g., “Humanity and Hope in a Southern Prison” by Peter Cozzens) to “Abraham Lincoln and the Federal Government” (e.g., “The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of Salmon P. Chase” by Rick Beard) to the final chapter, “Consequences” (e.g., “Remembering the Gettysburg Address” by Joshua Zeitz). Widmer writes of the “liberating” form (for academics) of these punchy, original essays written for a “digital commons,” and indeed they spread the net widely for some surprising moments of erudition, such as Melinda Miller and Rachel Smith Purvis’ essay about the Cherokee leaders producing their own emancipation acts in the wake of Lincoln’s in February 1863 (“The Cherokees Free Their Slaves”). Also notable are Crystal N. Feimster’s “Rape and Justice in the Civil War” and contributions by scholars Adam Goodheart, Jon Grinspan, Paul Finkelman, and Harold Holzer.
An excellent teaching tool, perfect for libraries.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-19-062183-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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by Ted Widmer
by John Lewis Gaddis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2002
Provocative, polymathic, pleasurable. (Illustrations throughout)
Entertaining, masterful disquisition on the aims, limitations, design, and methods of historiography.
Gaddis (Military and Naval History/Yale; We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, 1997) adapts the lectures he gave at Oxford while its George Eastman Visiting Professor (2000–01). Employing a wide range of metaphors (from Cleopatra’s nose to Napoleon’s underwear), displaying an extensive knowledge of current thinking in mathematics, physics, and evolutionary biology, alluding frequently to figures as disparate as Lee Harvey Oswald, Gwyneth Paltrow, John Lennon, and John Malkovich, Gaddis guides us on a genial trip into the historical method and the imagination that informs it. He begins by showing the relationship between a cartographer and a historian, asserting that the latter must “interpret the past for the purposes of the present with a view to managing the future.” He also takes us through a set of principles he believes historians must employ and reminds us that the imagination of the historian must always be tethered to reliable sources. He takes on social scientists (especially economists), observing that as they attempt to become more “scientific” (establishing laws, making accurate predictions), they move in the opposite direction of today’s “hard” scientists: “When social scientists are right, they too often confirm the obvious.” Gaddis moves to a discussion of variables (declaring irrelevant the distinction between “independent” and “dependent”: “interdependent,” he says, is the more accurate term), examines chaos theory and explores theories of causation. He ends with an intriguing discussion of the role of the biographer, insisting that historians retain a moral view of events, and with a reminder that they must necessarily distort even as they clarify. Historians, like teachers, he says, both oppress and liberate.
Provocative, polymathic, pleasurable. (Illustrations throughout)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-19-506652-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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by Paul VanDevelder ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 25, 2004
A sturdy companion to Michael Lieder and Jake Page’s Wild Justice (1997)—highly recommended for readers interested in Native...
A solid case study in an emerging trend: American Indian lawyers’ use of the courts to extract rights and dollars hidden away in long-forgotten treaties.
When William Clark saw the fall run of salmon on the Columbia River, writes freelance journalist VanDevelder, he exclaimed that he could cross from bank to bank on their backs without ever touching water. In 1991, only a single salmon made the journey to an Idaho lake; it was “stuffed, shellacked, and mounted on a pine board and hung in the governor’s office in the Idaho statehouse in Boise.” Its fate aptly describes a subtext of VanDevelder’s narrative, for there was a time when Social Darwinists in the American government hoped that the Indians, dispossessed of their land and stripped of their traditions, would simply fade away. In 1945, that thinking seemed a factor in the US Army Corps of Engineers’ plan to create a vast diversion dam across the Missouri River in North Dakota, one that would flood lands claimed by the Arikara, Hidatsa, and Mandan peoples, who had helped Lewis and Clark during the winter of 1804–5 and regretted it ever since. The dam was built, despite the protestations of Indian delegations to the US Congress, displacing thousands of Indians—including the family of Raymond Cross, who would grow up to attend Yale Law and who would take a vigorous interest in redressing the wrongs visited on his people. So he has done, battling the likes of Justices Rehnquist and Scalia, whom Cross characterizes as “an ideological tag team and throwback to another century.” Despite setbacks, writes VanDevelder, Cross and other Indian attorneys have been hitting hard, reasserting Indian rights and throwing unschooled judges into confusion as “Federal courts are now routinely asked to sort through the myriad of conflicting conditions to divine what tribal leaders understood at the time [a given] treaty was made.”
A sturdy companion to Michael Lieder and Jake Page’s Wild Justice (1997)—highly recommended for readers interested in Native American issues.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2004
ISBN: 0-316-89689-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
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