A mostly engaging account of how the West was won for women from all walks of life.
Journalist Gallagher looks beyond the archetypes of the cowgirl and the bonneted prairie homesteader to show the vast range of contributions made by women of the Old West.
By 1914, with the 19th Amendment still six years away, women in 11 of 14 Western states had “secured full enfranchisement before the women of even a single state back East.” This was no coincidence. Gallagher shows that between the 1840s and 1920, women had unique freedoms in the region that extends from the Great Plains to California, which was less burdened than the East “by tradition, precedent, and an entrenched, oppositional establishment.” New opportunities arose from an egalitarian “all-hands-on-deck” Western ethos and from energizing social forces like the Populist Party and temperance movement. Women gained further benefits from the Homestead Acts (which gave free land to female heads of households) and the tuition-free coeducational colleges created by the Morrill Land-Grant Acts. This upbeat account of the changes abounds with brief stories of trailblazers like Zitkala-Sa, a Sioux writer and musician; Elizabeth Piper Ensley, a Black teacher who founded the Colored Women’s Republican Club; and Jovita Idár, a critic of “Juan Crow” laws and the first president of the League of Mexican Women. At times, Gallagher casts her subjects in flat, modern terms, such as writing that one of them “prioritized” or had “skill sets.” Yet the stories mostly transcend occasional banalities. One of the most inspiring involves Luna Kellie, who, as an impoverished Nebraska homesteader, grew “too malnourished to produce adequate milk for two of her babies, who died.” Undaunted, she joined the Farmers’ Alliance and published the progressive Prairie Home newspaper on a press in her bedroom. “Somehow,” writes the author, “she crammed politics into her already packed schedule of farm chores, care of her eleven offspring, temperance activities, and duties at her Methodist church.”
A mostly engaging account of how the West was won for women from all walks of life.Pub Date: July 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2325-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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 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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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