A welcome contribution to the literature of slavery, the Civil War, and American immigration.
Historical examination of a dilemma facing 19th-century Jewish immigrants to the U.S.: Did assimilation require supporting slavery?
As Kreitner observes in opening, many Jews in both the North and the South supported slavery as biblically endorsed, with one New York rabbi asking abolitionists, “Does it not strike you that you are guilty of something very little short of blasphemy?” It did not help that many abolitionists were also fervent evangelists who sought to convert as well as liberate, some of whom “called for altering the Constitution to make America an officially Christian nation.” Kreitner follows the lives of six representative figures, three of them rabbis. Of them, one was opposed to abolition, one wanted Jews to stay out of the argument for their own security, and one was wholeheartedly opposed to slavery. Adding to these are three secular Jews, not especially religious, who took different paths: one a veteran of the European revolutions who came to America in 1848 and fought with John Brown in Bloody Kansas; a socialist named Ernestine Rose, who combined her opposition to slavery with a strong denunciation of “women’s subjugation”; and, best known of all, Judah Benjamin, the slave-owning Louisiana senator who became the most powerful member of Jefferson Davis’ cabinet but who, Kreitner notes, is also “conspicuously absent from the Lost Cause pantheon.” Though it is difficult to generalize from so small a sample, Kreitner makes clear that each was sincere in his or her beliefs: The antislavery rabbi David Einhorn, for instance, held that “Jews fortunate enough to have found refuge in the United States should work to make it better, for everyone,” while Benjamin sought to protect his financial interests even as he recognized that sooner or later the South would have to abandon slavery—and who wisely fled the country at the Civil War’s end.
A welcome contribution to the literature of slavery, the Civil War, and American immigration.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9780374608453
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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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