An illuminating history of events, many barely mentioned in history books and none, unlike our Revolution, with happy...
An informative and disturbing account of a little-known campaign during the Colonial rebellion.
Invited to the First Continental Congress in 1774, the British colony of West Florida declined, remaining loyal until conquered by Spanish forces in 1781. “The American Revolution on the Gulf coast is a story without minutemen, without ‘founding fathers,’ without rebels,” writes DuVal (Early American History and American Indian History/Univ. of North Carolina; The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent, 2006). “It reveals a different war with unexpected participants, forgotten outcomes, and surprising winners and losers….On the Gulf Coast…the Revolution seemed to be just another imperial war, another war fought for territory and treasure.” The author builds her story around a handful of participants. Revolutionary leaders dealt with Oliver Pollock, a wealthy New Orleans businessman who bankrupted himself supporting the revolution, as well as Payamataha and Alexander McGillivray, spokesmen for Chickasaw and Creek tribes. Less well-known are Petit Jean, a slave, and Amand Broussard, a refugee from French Canada. Both helped Spain (who ruled New Orleans) when it joined France to aid the Colonies. Representing Britain was James Bruce, an official in Pensacola, the capital of West Florida. Popular histories trumpet American rage at taxation, but more probably raged at Britain’s proclamation forbidding settlers west of the Appalachians. Despite ongoing incursions into their territory, Indians continued to focus on tribal rivalries and trade. Readers will share DuVal’s frustration at their leaders’ futile efforts to deal with whites. The colonies won, but few readers will feel patriotic pride as the author describes how, over the next generation, the U.S. harassed Spain until it ceded Florida and brutally expelled the Indians from their lands.
An illuminating history of events, many barely mentioned in history books and none, unlike our Revolution, with happy endings.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6895-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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 Yorkerstaff 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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