A fine work of scholarship, offering a view of the metropolis that few today know.
New York: multiethnic, liberal, progressive—and a nexus of slavery in North America.
Occasioned by the discovery of what is now called the African Burial Ground, alongside what is now New York’s City Hall (but well beyond the original city limits), these 12 essays from authorities on African-American history address the fact that “for nearly three hundred years, slavery was an intimate part of the lives of all New Yorkers, black and white.” No sooner had the Dutch arrived than were slaves with names such as Big Manuel and Simon Congo at work clearing land throughout the Hudson Valley, though they soon, as historian Christopher Moore notes, “undertook what certainly was one of the first organized job actions by workers in North America,” successfully petitioning for wages. Conditions would not improve when rule of New York fell to the British; the rule of law would extend to Africans and African-Americans, but almost always to control behavior rather than protect their persons or interests. Colonial governor Robert Hunter was appalled when, after a slave uprising in 1712, New York authorities executed 24 men (and one woman) for their actions, remarking that in the West Indies, “where their laws against their slaves are most severe,” a handful would have been killed as an example to others. Laws were remade to uphold and strengthen slavery in New York in the early days of American independence, and New York was far slower than its neighbors to move toward abolition; in the years preceding the Civil War, its economy was so bound up with the South’s that, wrote one journalist, it was “almost as dependent upon Southern slavery as Charleston itself.” Illustrated with reproduced documents, artwork and photographs, the volume concludes with a consideration of African-American life in New York after the war until the turn of the century.
A fine work of scholarship, offering a view of the metropolis that few today know.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-56584-997-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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