I found Akst’s book
revelatory, opening up a whole sphere of American history between the world
wars that I was only vaguely aware of.
I was moved by the sheer moral tenacity
of men and women who refused to accept the necessity for war under any circumstances. His four central characters – Black activist Bayard Rustin, Catholic
radical Dorothy Day, the religious intellectual David Dellinger, and leftwing
journalist Dwight Macdonald – struggled for their values at great personal cost
to themselves.
Akst, who writes beautifully, is a sympathetic but critical
narrator who shows persuasively that techniques that the pacifists developed
went on to significantly shape the later Civil Rights and Vietnam-era antiwar
movements.
"Akst argues that the modern progressive movement, wide-ranging in its causes and narratives today, has origins in the pacifist response to American involvement in World War II... At its best, one gets the sense of generative force born from such intense intellectual, moral and religious pressure." -- The Washington Post
Pacifists who fought against the Second World War faced insurmountable odds—but their resistance, philosophy, and strategies fostered a tradition of activism that shaped America right up to the present day.
In this provocative and deeply researched work of history, Akst takes readers into the wild, heady, and uncertain times of…
This is a thrilling account
of one of the worst disasters ever to befall an American city, laying waste to
20 percent of the great midwestern metropolis in 1871. Berg vividly brings
alive Chicagoans, great and small – poor immigrants, scheming pols, profit-driven
businessmen, and unsung local heroes – in a moment of unimaginable crisis.
Berg
is a brilliant narrative writer as well as an acute historian with a masterful
eye for detail and penetrating insight into the political rivalries, economic
imperatives, and architectural problems that made the city so vulnerable and
that shaped its stunningly dynamic recovery.
I have never read a better account
of what makes a big city tick.
The "illuminating" (New Yorker) story of the Great Chicago Fire: a raging inferno, a harrowing fight for survival, and the struggle for the soul of a city—told with the "the clarity—and tension—of a well-wrought military narrative" (Wall Street Journal)
In the fall of 1871, Chicagoans knew they were due for the “big one”—a massive, uncontrollable fire that would decimate the city. It had been bone-dry for months, and a recent string of blazes had nearly outstripped the fire department’s already scant resources. Then, on October 8, a minor fire broke out in the barn of Irishwoman Kate Leary. A series…
Cozzens took me on a wild ride through the chaotic violence
of one of the country’s most significant but least well-known Indian wars,
which led to the destruction of a once-powerful native confederacy and the expulsion
of the Creeks from their lands in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Cozzens is
a fair-minded historian who does not play favorites.
It’s impossible to
read this book without coming to a fuller understanding of the raw violence
that characterized the southern frontier or for the insurmountable challenges
for native people who sought to find an accommodation with the oncoming tide of
American settlement.
From the devastating invasion by Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century to the relentless pressure from white settlers 150 years later, A Brutal Reckoning tells the story of encroachment on the vast Native American territory in the Deep South, which gave rise to the Creek War, the bloodiest in American Indian history, and propelled Andrew Jackson into national prominence, as he led the US Army in a ruthless campaign.
It was a war that involved not only white Americans and Native Americans but also the British and the Spanish, and ultimately led to…
Klan War is an unflinching investigation
into the history of Ulysses Grant’s campaign to defeat the Ku Klux Klan’s war
of terror against newly freed people and their White allies in the 1870s.
The
narrative travels from the hamlets of the South to the corridors of power in
Washington, bringing to life an unsung generation of grassroots Black and White
leaders as they attempted, in the face of often horrific violence, to create a
two-party system in the post-Confederate South.
Although victorious against the
Klan, Grant’s efforts were ultimately thwarted by fading northern support for
Reconstruction. The story of the Klan War vividly explores the roots of white
supremacy and homegrown American terrorism.
