A fresh perspective on Civil War history and its resounding reverberations.
A study of the battle of schools of religious nationalism surrounding the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the lingering effect of that battle today.
As Oxford historian Carwardine observes, the terms “religious nationalist” and “Christian nationalist” are “commonly synonymous with the conservative white evangelical Protestants who make up a core strength of the current Republican Party.” There is historical cause for this narrowing of terms. In the antebellum era, as Carwardine chronicles, many nationalisms emerged. The southern strain, associated with the Anglican/Episcopal Church, took it as read that God was all in for slavery and that demonic forces were assembled against them. In the North, hardcore antislavery nationalists were largely outnumbered by more mainstream ideologies, dominated by Methodism, that advocated a more conservative approach. The abolitionists were, Carwardine writes, “predominantly Protestant in faith…[and] commonly defined their purposes in biblical terms: a specially chosen people, the citizens of the young country had a duty to apply the prophetic wisdom of the Old Testament and Christ himself by expunging the nation’s greatest sin.” Interestingly, Abraham Lincoln was largely indifferent to religion when he entered office, but the “providentialist” view that found him invoking “the better angels of our nature” became more militant as the fighting ground on. As Carwardine points out, many visions of Christian nationalism—and even some nationalisms that involved those excluded from the Protestant mainstream, namely Jews and Catholics—flourished and contended in the North, even as the South dug in its heels to advocate “white-supremacist, pro-slavery, and anti-authoritarian political positions.” Those positions were articulated in the North as well, though, and after what Carwardine calls the postwar “breakup of antislavery religious nationalists’ wartime coalition,” they survived and, in the form of today’s states’ rights Christian nationalism, are much with us today.
A fresh perspective on Civil War history and its resounding reverberations.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9781400044573
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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