Twelve Years A Slave - Solomon Northup

   2013; 363 pages.  Full Title: Twelve Years A Slave: The Autobiography of Solomon Northup. New Author(s)?  : Yes.  Genres : Biographies & Memoirs; American history; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating: 9½*/10.

 

    Twelve Years A Slave is a gripping account of the horrors and injustices of the pre-Civil War slave system.  Probably only Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous work, Uncle Tom’s Cabin had a bigger impact on abolitionist sentiment in the Northern US states during the 1850s.

 

    We follow Solomon Northup as he is kidnapped and shipped to New Orleans, then forced to work on cotton plantations and in the sugar cane fields.  He spent twelve years of his life in servitude, twelve years that he’ll never get back.  Twelve years of being separated from his wife and three kids back in New York who were left wondering what happened to him and whether they’ll ever see him again.

 

    Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Twelve Years A Slave are both acclaimed accounts of slavery in the South.  But there’s one important difference.

 

    Uncle Tom’s Cabin is fictional while Twelve Years a Slave is an autobiography.

 

What’s To Like...

    It may sound like an oxymoron, but the autobiography Twelve Years A Slave is written by three authors.  As a black freeman born in New York in 1808, Solomon Northup had learned to read and write.   But this book was actually ghost-written in the 1850s by David Wilson.  A century later, long after Twelve Years A Slave had faded into complete obscurity, historian Sue Eakin came across a copy of the book, thoroughly researched its contents, and published an “expanded version” of it, which is the format I read it in.

 

    Solomon Northup was kidnapped and enslaved in 1841, and wasn't rescued until 1853.  My history classes didn’t spend too much time on that decade prior to the Civil War, so there were a number of historical surprises waiting for me in Twelve Years A Slave.

 

    One of them was the way Solomon became a slave.  He was drugged while in Washington DC, put into a slave pen there, then put on board a ship sailing to Louisiana.  It was called a Reverse Underground Railroad, and I’d never heard of such a thing.  Sunday Money was also an eye-opener for me, ditto for the rules used for slaves celebrating Christmas in the South (see the second excerpt below).  I marveled at the use of “lumber women”, was revolted by the conditions in the slave pens, and was amazed at the system used to pick cotton efficiently.

 

    Solomon’s even-handed portrayal of plantation life impressed me.  Yes, there were some exceptionally cruel masters, such as the man who owned Solomon for the last ten years of his incarceration.  But he had served under the ownership of a relatively kind-hearted owner for the first two years.

    This variety of descriptions seemed to irritate a number of readers/reviewers.  Some gave low marks because they felt the book painted too gruesome of a picture of slavery.  Others gave low marks because they thought it painted too rosy of a picture.  That’s where Sue Eakin’s research comes into play.  Her exhaustive investigation, detailed in more than a hundred footnotes, confirms Solomon’s observations for the most part, although there were one or two instances where she felt David Wilson may have been “stretching the truth” a bit.

 

    Although this is a non-fiction tale, it has a storybook ending, with Solomon at long last reuniting with his family.  It’s not a spoiler to reveal that; after all, if he never regained his freedom, this book would never have been written.  But it's worth reading this book to see how he managed to win his release.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.4*/5, based on 946 ratings and 519 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.22*/5, based on 117,665 ratings and 8,076 reviews

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Expatiate (v.) : to speak or write in great detail or length.

Others: Groggery (n.); Cachinations (n., plural); Condign (adj); Latterly (adv.); Betimes (adj.).

 

Excerpts...

    Ten years I toiled for that man without reward.  Ten years of my incessant labor has contributed to increase the bulk of his possessions.  Ten years I was compelled to address him with down-cast eyes and uncovered head—in the attitude and language of a slave.  I am indebted to him for nothing, save undeserved abuse and stripes.  (loc. 2115)

 

    During the remaining holidays succeeding Christmas, they are provided with passes, and permitted to go where they please within a limited distance, or they may remain and labor on the plantation, in which case they are paid for it.  (…)

    They are different beings from what they are in the field; the temporary relaxation, the brief deliverance from fear, and from the lash, producing an entire metamorphosis in their appearance and demeanor.  In visiting, riding, renewing old friendships, or, perchance, reviving some old attachment, or pursuing whatever pleasure may suggest itself, the time is occupied.  Such is “southern life as it is,” three days in the year, as I found it—the other three hundred and sixty-two being days of weariness, and fear, and suffering, and unremitting labor.  (loc. 2529)

 

Kindle Details…

    This version of Twelve Years A Slave presently sells for $0.99 at Amazon.  There are several dozen other versions of it available in e-book format, ranging in price from $0.99 to $10.00.

 

In cotton picking time, Patsey was queen of the field.  (loc. 2180)

    There’s little to quibble about in Twelve Years A Slave.  The standard cusswords are handled in an unusual manner: the underworld is given in the text as “h_l”, and to be condemned to be sent there is rendered as “d_d”.  The racial epithet n-word is the main bit of profanity, but let's face it; this story couldn’t be written without it.  The sum total of epithets-plus-cusswords for the first third of the book was less than a dozen, which both surprised and impressed me.

 

    There was a fair amount of British spellings, such as offence/offense and whisky/whiskey; some cities were hyphenated, such as New-York, and a slew of "separated" compound words, such as heart sick/heartsick and candle light/candlelight.  I’m pretty sure these are not typos.  All languages evolve over time, including Americanized English. As an editor, I found this fascinating, not distracting.

 

    This being the expanded version, means there are oodles of extra sections, both before and after Solomon’s actual account, which ends at 59% Kindle.  I’d tell you the page number, but those aren’t included in this e-book version.  The only “must read” added section is “After Freedom, What Happened?” which is located at Kindle 59%-64%, and provides an eye-opening epilogue to Solomon’s life.  Other than that, feel free to partake of or eschew any of the extras.  Some I read; others I skipped.

 

    For me, Twelve Years A Slave was a great read.  So much of the details of the daily life of slaves gets pushed under the carpet in history classes, and that’s true no matter what part of the US you live in.  It was enlightening to finally read a firsthand account of how it really was.

 

    9½ Stars.  After being freed in 1853, Solomon Northup went on a widely-popular speaking tour throughout the North, railing against the evils of human bondage.  Alas, his stardom was short-lived and he, along with his book, soon fell back into obscurity.  No one knows where and when he died.  Nobody knows where his body is buried.  Solomon Northup simply disappears.  Sic transit gloria mundi.

A People's History of the United States - Howard Zinn

   1980; 246 pages (first ten chapters only.)  New Author? : No.  Genres : U.S. History, Social Justice, Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

 

    I remember it well: it was the first time I questioned what they were teaching us in American History class.

 

    We had facts to memorize about the Civil War.  It started in 1861 at Fort Sumter.  It ended in 1865 at Appomattox.  It was fought to free the slaves, which Abraham Lincoln did on January 1, 1863 when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

 

    And my junior high school brain wondered:  why was there a two-year gap between the start of the war and when the slaves were freed?  What were we fighting for in 1861-62?  Why isn't the teacher telling us about that time gap?

 

    Later on, in high school or college, I learned that technically, the Emancipation Proclamation only freed the slaves in states that had seceded from the Union.  It did not apply to the slaveholding “border states” of Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and Delaware.

 

    That made me wonder if there was a lot more of what we were being taught as "United States history" also omitted key information.  And why.

 

What’s To Like...

    Note: The full version of Howard Zinn’s 1980 book, A People’s History of the United States, has 21 chapters, and covers topics from Columbus to Watergate.  Later, an “updated” issue was published comprising Chapters 11 onward, with a couple of added chapters that addressed more-recent events.  That book is titled The Twentieth Century – A People’s History; I’ve read it; it’s fantastic, and it is reviewed here.   This present review is for the first ten chapters of the original book, which are:

 

01.  Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress (the Discovery of the New World)

02. Drawing the Color Line (the Birth of Slavery)

03. Persons of Mean and Vile Condition (First Rebellions)

04. Tyranny is Tyranny (All Men are Created Equal, except...)

05. A Kind of Revolution (The War of Independence, the Constitution)

06. The Intimately Oppressed (Women’s Suffrage)

07. As Long as Grass Grows or Water Runs (Indian Removal from the Eastern US)

08. We Take Nothing by Conquest, Thank God (the Mexican-American War)

09. Slavery without Submission, Emancipation without Freedom (the Civil War)

10. The Other Civil War (Labor Unrest in the 1800s)

 

    Howard Zinn was politically an unabashed Socialist, and a prodigious author.  He wrote a series of “People’s History” books, starting with this one, which inspired other authors to take up the cause of writing history from the common man’s point of view.  (See the first excerpt, below.)

 

    That shift of focus makes this book a reading treasure for any American history enthusiast.  It was enlightening to learn about the brilliant Seminole chief, Osceola, and meet the feisty women’s suffragette champion, Sojourner Truth.  Andrew Jackson is aptly described as “the most aggressive enemy of Indians in US history”, and the eloquence of the writings Frederick Douglass was awe-inspiring.

 

    Neither George Washington nor Abraham Lincoln rate very high in Howard Zinn’s opinion.  The former was one of the richest persons in colonial America, and was more interested in preserving the "favored" status of the upper class to which he belonged.  Lincoln was a shrewd politician who knew when to give pro-abolition speeches, and when to give pro-slavery ones.

 

    I learned a lot about workers’ strikes and labor protests, starting as early as the 1600s.  These were never mentioned in my high school history classes: Shays’ Rebellion, Bacon’s rebellion, the Anti-Renter Movement, the Flour Riot of 1837, and many more.  I chuckled to see my boyhood city of Reading, Pennsylvania mentioned.  There, during a strike against the railroad for withholding wages: “two thousand people gathered, while men who had blackened their faces with coal dust set about methodically tearing up tracks, jamming switches, derailing cars, setting fire to cabooses and also to a railroad bridge.” (pg. 243)

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.7/5 based on 14,543 ratings and 3,302 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.07/5 based on 232,910 ratings and 6,782 reviews

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Cliometricians (n., plural) : statistical historians.

 

Excerpts...

    In that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokee, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott’s army, of the rise of industrialization as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills…   (pg. 10)

 

    They organized.  Women struck by themselves for the first time in 1825.  They were the United Tailoresses of New York, demanding higher wages.  In 1828, the first strike of mill women on their own took place in Dover, New Hampshire, when several hundred women paraded with banners and flags.  They shot off gunpowder, in protest against new factory rules, which charged fines for coming late, forbade talking on the job, and required church attendance.  They were forced to return to the mill, their demands unmet, and their leaders were fired and blacklisted.  (pg. 223)

 

“The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don’t listen to it, you will never know what justice is.”  (pg. 10)

    There’s not much to quibble about in A People’s History of the United States.  In the entire 246 pages of those first 10 chapters, there was only one cussword, a damn, and that was because it was in a direct quote.

 

    Speaking of direct quotes, Howard Zinn knew that there’d be pushback to his “People’s History” tome.  He therefore included a slew of direct quotes in the text, and is to be commended for that.  But be aware that vocabulary, spelling, and capitalization rules in English have changed considerably since the 16^th-19^th centuries.  Reading this book can sometimes be slow and laborious.. But that’s in no way a criticism, and kudos to Zinn for adhering to word-for-word quotations of historical speeches and writings.

 

    We live in a world where books are banned and schoolteachers are muzzled so that only the “my country is always right” side of our nation’s past is presented.  Today, it’s more important than ever to make sure that the complete history of the United States is available for all those who want to learn about it.   Many thanks to Howard Zinn and others for penning this “People’s History” series.

 

    9½ Stars.    And for the record, yes, I did finally learn why the Emancipation Proclamation came out two years after the Civil War started and why it only applied to slaves in the states that had seceded from the US.

The Twentieth Century: A People's History - Howard Zinn

   2007; 512 pages.  Full Title: The Twentieth Century: A People’s History.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : US History; Non-Fiction; World History.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

 

    The image shown to the left notwithstanding, the complete title of this book, as given by Amazon, is: The Twentieth Century: A People’s History.  But what exactly is meant by “A People’s History”, and how does it differ from the hero-centric, “America-the-Perfect” version we all were taught in public schools when growing up?  Well, Howard Zinn is the author, so we’ll let him explain it.

 

    “I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, the Mexican War as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott’s army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American War as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by the black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America.”  (loc. 94).

 

    Well, now.  I think Howard Zinn’s approach to History might be quite eye-opening..

 

What’s To Like...

    The Twentieth Century: A People’s History is a huge excerpt from Howard Zinn’s 1980 magnum opus A People’s History of the United States.  It encompasses Chapters 11-23, which deal with the time period from the 1890s through the 1970s, and so is essentially the latter half of that book.  Zinn then updated things with two new chapters which close out the 1990s.  Later on, that pair of chapters were also added back into A People’s History of the United States.

 

    The book is divided into 14 chapters, plus a prologue.  The chapters are:

01: The Empire and the People (Land-grabbing from Spain)

02: The Socialist Challenge (The rise of unions and the heyday of the Socialist party)

03: War is the Health of the State (World War 1)

04: Self-Help in Hard Times (The Great Depression)

05: A People’s War (WW2, the Korean War, the Bay of Pigs)

06: Or Does It Explode? (The Black Civil Rights Movement)

07: The Impossible Victory (Vietnam)

08: Surprises (Feminist and Native American Movements, Prison Riots)

09: The Seventies: Under Control?  (Watergate, a great Recession)

10: Carter-Reagan-Bush: The Bipartisan Consensus (Iran-Contra, Desert Storm)

11: The Unreported Resistance (Protests of Nukes, Reagan, Iraq war, Columbus Day)

12: The Coming Revolt of the Guards (Zinn’s vision and hope for the future)

13: The Clinton Presidency (Protests in the 1990s)

14: The 2000 Election and the “War on Terrorism” (how the Gore/Bush election was stolen)

 

    It needs to be recognized that politically, Howard Zinn was a Socialist.  As such, he is unimpressed with both the Democratic and Republican presidents and parties, viewing the two parties as pretty much the same, particularly when it comes to Capitalism and Imperialism.

 

    The book is chock full of interesting history tidbits.  I enjoyed learning about “Bootleg Coal” and the birth of the CIO labor union.  I never knew (or had since forgotten) that Native Americans "liberated" Alcatraz Island in 1969 and claimed it for their own.  The “Rules for Female Teachers” in chapter 2 were eye-opening and I was surprised to learn that Eugene Debs, the perennial Socialist candidate for president way back when, spent 32 months in prison for violating the “Espionage Act”.

 

    It was fun to become reacquainted with  various Americans who have gradually faded from memory: Joseph McCarthy, Rosa Parks, Aldous Huxley, the brothers Philip and Daniel Berrigan, Shirley Chisolm, Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky, and many more.  I was amazed to learn that the author Jack London and the activist Helen Keller were both deeply associated with the Socialist Party.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.4/5 based on 84 ratings and 47 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.16/5 based on 1,120 ratings and 80 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    For the United States to step forward as a defender of helpless countries matched its image in American high school history textbooks, but not its record in world affairs.  It had instigated a war with Mexico and taken half of that country.  It had pretended to help Cuba win freedom from Spain, and then planted itself in Cuba with a military base, investments, and rights of intervention.  It had seized Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and fought a brutal war to subjugate the Filipinos.  It had “opened” Japan to its trade with gunboats and threats.  (…) It had sent troops to Peking with other nations, to assert Western supremacy in China, and kept them there for over thirty years.  (loc. 2234)

 

    From 1964 to 1972, the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the world made a maximum military effort, with everything short of atomic bombs, to defeat a nationalist revolutionary movement in a tiny, peasant country—and failed.  When the United States fought in Vietnam, it was organized modern technology versus organized human beings, and the human beings won.

    In the course of that war, there developed in the United States the greatest antiwar movement the nation had ever experienced, a movement that played a critical part in bringing the war to an end.  (loc. 3405)

 

Kindle Details…

    The Twentieth Century currently sells for $12.49 at Amazon.  Howard Zinn has several dozen more e-books at Amazon, almost all of which fall into the genres of Politics and/or History, and range in price from $5.99 to $17.99.  There are several other authors who write history books with the “People’s History” slant, including A People’s History of the World by Chris Harman which right now goes for $10.99, which may well be my next venture into this sub-genre.

 

“When the guns of war become a national obsession, social needs inevitably suffer.” (Martin Luther King Jr.)  (loc. 3285)

    There’s not much to quibble about in The Twentieth Century: A People’s History, provided you understand where Howard Zinn stands politically.  But it did seem like, as the book made its way towards present times, historical accuracy started morphing into the author’s wishful thinking.

 

    This was especially evident in chapter 13, where Howard Zinn tediously recounts all sorts of minor protests in the 1990s, making it sound like there was civil unrest of similar magnitude to what was seen in the 1900s decade and again the 1950s.  That simply isn’t true, the unions at the close of the 20th century were pitifully weak and the Socialists had long faded into being a fringe party.  Zinn’s rationale as to why the Reagan/Bush electoral landslides don’t count is also rather weak.

 

    But perhaps this was inevitable, since the closer “history” comes to being “current events”, the more speculative it inherently becomes.  For example, if I were to try to write the history of the Covid pandemic and the 2016/2020 presidential elections today, I am certain that in 20 years it will be found to have lots of inaccuracies.

 

    9 Stars.  Overall, it was really nice to see the ordinary people get the recognition they deserve for the shaping of American history events.  Even growing up, I enjoyed learning how things actually went down instead of the whitewashed history we were all fed in junior and senior high school.  Thank you, Howard Zinn, for making the term “People’s History” familiar to those readers who aren't historians.  I will be on the lookout for more of your books.

How The States Got Their Shapes - Mark Stein

   2008; 306 pages.  Book 1 (out of 2) in the “How the States Got Their Shapes” series.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : US History; Geography; Reference; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

 

    “Why does Delaware have a semicircle for its northern border?  What’s at its center and why was it encircled?  Why does Texas have that square part poking up?  And why does the square part just miss connecting with Kansas, leaving that little Oklahoma panhandle in between?

 

    The more one looks at state borders, the more questions those borders generate.  Why do the Carolinas and Dakotas have a North state and a South state?  Couldn’t they get along?  Why is there a West Virginia but not an East Virginia?  And why does Michigan have a chunk of land that’s so obviously part of Wisconsin?  It’s not even connected to the rest of Michigan.

 

    This book will provide those answers.  State by state (along with the District of Columbia), the events that resulted in the location of each state’s present borders will be identified.”

 

    (from the Introduction to “How The States Got Their Shapes” by Mark Stein)

 

What’s To Like...

    The book’s title, and the teasers in the Introduction listed above, say it all.  How The States Got Their Shapes is a detailed reference work, replete with lots of little-known history, geography, and political tidbits that combine to logically explain how each colony and/or territory morphed into the present-day United States.

 

    The book is structured to be first and foremost a handy reference resource.  After the Introduction, there’s an enigmatically-titled chapter called Don’t Skip This – You’ll Just Have to Come Back Later.  Do what the title says, it goes over a number of territorial acquisitions that impacted the borders of multiple states.  These events include the French and Indian War, the Louisiana Purchase, the Nootka Convention (say what?), the Adams-Onis Treaty (say who?!), and a sustained effort by the federal government to adhere to the principle that all states should be created equal.

 

    Following that are chapters about each of the 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, presented in alphabetical order. Each one starts out with a couple of teaser questions (anywhere from three to six), then gives the answers via historical details.  The chapters are further subdivided by the borders' directions, so, for instance, the Alabama chapter addresses first its southern border, then its eastern, western, and northern boundaries.

 

    This might sound tedious, but the chapters are short (generally less than 6 pages) and almost always contain several maps illustrating the “before and after” shape of the state as each change in its borders took effect.  Whoever created these maps deserves a special tip of the hat!

 

    The discovery of gold within a territory usually impacted its later borders, but not in the way I expected.  You’d think a prospective state would want to latch on to such a valuable resource, but that was rarely the case.  A gold rush meant a rapid influx of gold miners, who were known to not care much for legal systems.  Law-enforcement was iffy at best, and even worse, those rowdy prospectors could quickly outnumber the citizens already there, and vote in their own types.  Territories about to apply for statehood always tried to exclude gold finds from their proposed boundaries.

 

    Pro- and anti-slavery sentiments had the same sort of effect.  Royal charters usually bequeathed a colony all the land within its north-south latitudes from the Atlantic clear to the Pacific.  But most colonies voluntarily ceded to the federal government their western lands beyond some modest point.  The reasons were not altruistic.  Usually, they hoped those lands would become multiple states, with two senators each, and who were expected to vote along the same pro- or anti-slavery lines of the original colony.

 

    Other recurring factors that caused hiccups in states lines include mountains (you can’t enforce your laws if you can’t get over the hills), sloppy surveyors (or sometimes, drunken ones), and ambiguous, overlapping, or erroneous charters from the king.  Lastly, we won’t even mention the numerous instances of neighboring states squabbling with each other, seemingly just for the sake of strutting their stuff.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.4/5 based on 667 ratings and 400 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.52/5 based on 3,377 ratings and 620 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    Texas first became a place of continual colonial settlement in 1691, when Spain grew alarmed at reports that Frenchmen had crossed the Sabine River from Louisiana.  The French, possibly testing the waters for colonial expansion, were befriending the local Indians, an alliance of tribes known by their native word for “allies,” tejas.  Spain dispatched an expedition to clear out the area of the French and convert the Indians to Christianity.  To ensure that the French stayed out and the Indians stayed Christian, Spain built missions throughout the region and established the province of Tejas.  (loc. 2800)

 

    When the New York authorities attempted to tax the residents [in Vermont], they found themselves facing the muskets of Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys.

    Before violence erupted, however, the American Revolution commenced.  In keeping with the spirit of the time, the region declared its own independence as the state of Vermont.  When the Continental Congress refused to recognize it, Vermont threatened to ally itself with England.  In response, Congress voted to invade Vermont!  But George Washington resisted, pointing out that his troops had little desire to fight fellow Americans.  (loc. 2982)

 

Kindle Details…

    How the States Got Their Shapes is currently priced at $10.99 at Amazon.  The sequel, How the States Got Their Shapes Too: The People Behind the Borderlines, goes for $13.99.  Mark Stein has several other e-books for your Kindle, all non-fiction, which range in price from $11.99 to $16.64.

 

California violated the policy of equality among states because it could.  The United States needed California more than California needed the United States.  (loc. 454)

    There are a couple quibbles, but nothing major.

 

    Obviously, the reason for, say, Pennsylvania’s northern border with New York is the same as the reason for New York’s southern border with Pennsylvania.  Therefore, repetition of information is inevitable.  The author generally tries to minimize this, often by giving the historical details from the perspective of whichever state is the subject of that chapter.  Usually he mentions that you can also read about this in the other state’s chapter.  Some reviewers seemed to be really irked about this, but I didn’t find it off-putting at all.

 

    There are some typos to trip over along the way: Not/Now, Face/Fact, Calvary/Cavalry, it/its, and one that made me chuckle: memer/member.

 

    Finally, I have to admit that trying to read too many chapters in one sitting sometimes blurred my brain.  So even though you can probably plow through How The States Got Their Shapes in a single night, my advice is to read, say, a half-dozen chapters per session, then put the book down and read something else.  This trick also works when reading books of poetry.

 

    9 Stars.  I’m a history and geography buff, so How The States Got Their Shapes kept me entertained throughout.  Trivia buffs will also enjoy this book.  The origin of Texas’s name is given above, but you’ll also learn about things such as the “Toledo War”, what state was initially called the “Jefferson Territory”, and how Nevada got away with stealing 18,000 square miles from the Arizona territory.

The Partly Cloudy Patriot - Sarah Vowell

   2002; 200 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Essays; Politics & Government; US History; Anecdotes.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

    Sarah Vowell wrote three fantastic History books between 2008 and 2015, all of which I’ve read and reviewed.  The Wordy Shipmates chronicles the Puritan colonists; Unfamiliar Fishes tells how the United States came about acquiring the Hawaiian Islands; and Lafayette in the Somewhat United States which focuses on that the famous French general who helped our cause in the Revolutionary War.

    I enjoyed them all, giving each on a rating in the 8-9 Stars range, and since then I’ve been looking forward eagerly to whatever historical subject she next researches and writes about.  Alas, five years later, I’m still waiting.  If she’s put written any books since then, neither Wikipedia nor Amazon are aware of it.

    Fortunately, there are four Sarah Vowell books from the 1997-2005 timespan, in which, I gather, she writes about a variety of topics instead of focusing on just one.  I’ve got three of those books on either my Kindle or my TBR shelf.  And since it’s been five years since I last read anything by her, I felt it was time to pull one of them off the shelf and get cracking.

    I chose the one with the enigmatic title The Partly Cloudy Patriot.

What’s To Like...

    The Partly Cloudy Patriot is a collection of nineteen articles from Sarah Vowell, about evenly split between ones that were previously published and ones  that were new.  Their length varies from 4 to 32 pages, which means some can technically be called essays and others called anecdotes.

    The articles cover a broad spectrum of genres, including historical (the Salem witch trials); politics (presidential libraries); athletics (arcade basketball, aka “Pop-a-Shot”); art (German cinema); Hollywood (thoughts about Tom Cruise); travel (there’s a restaurant in the Carlsbad Caverns); bloopers (maps that show California as an island), and family (Sarah Vowell is a twin!).

    My two favorite chapters were Rosa Parks, C’est Moi, which cites various people who have dared to compare themselves to Rosa Parks, and the titular The Partly Cloudy Patriot, which examines the not-so-patriotic ways some people define “patriotism”.  My two favorite chapter titles were God Will Give You Blood to Drink in a Souvenir Shot Glass and Tom Landry, Existentialist, Dead at 75.  I’ll let you guess what those two chapters are about.

    It was fun to get to know the author a bit.  As mentioned, Sarah is a twin (fraternal, not identical), is an atheist who was raised a Pentecostal, has endured family Thanksgivings (haven’t we all?), and worked as a teenager in a map-dealer’s store.  She’s also a diehard Dallas Cowboy fan, but hey, nobody's perfect.

    Being a Pennsylvanian by birth, I enjoyed her walk through the Gettysburg battlefield, and chuckled at the brief mention of the unique town of Hershey.  I liked the literary nods to The Great Gatsby and The Cross and the Switchblade.  I read the latter at some point in my junior high years.   Luther and Johnny Htoo were new to me, as was the chocolatey caffé mocha from Starbucks, and the Tom Landry Christian comic book left me scratching my head.

    Sarah Vowell’s wit abounds throughout, which made this a fun read from beginning to end.  And while my favorite books by her will continue to be those that focus on a single historical subject, The Partly Cloudy Patriot serves as an excellent stopgap until she gets back to writing full-length books again.

Excerpts...

    I wish that in order to secure his party’s nomination, a presidential candidate would be required to point at the sky and name all the stars; have the periodic table of the elements memorized; rattle off the kings and queens of Spain; joke around in Latin; interpret the symbolism of seventeenth-century Dutch painting; explain photosynthesis to a six-year-old; recite Emily Dickinson; bake a perfect popover; build a shortwave radio out of a coconut; and know all the words to Hoagy Carmichael’s “Two Sleepy People”, Johnny Cash’s “Five Feet High and Rising”, and “You Got the Silver” by the Rolling Stones.  (loc. 1308)

    In 1873, Canada’s first prime minister, John MacDonald, saw what was happening in the American Wild West and organized a police force to make sure Canada steered clear of America’s bloodbath.

    That’s it.  Or, as they might say in Quebec, voilà!  That explains how the Canadians are different from Americans.  No cowboys for Canada.  Canada got Mounties instead – Dudley Do-Right, not John Wayne.  (loc. 1599)

American history is a quagmire, and the more one knows, the quaggier the mire gets.  (loc. 1676 )

    I've yet to find much to gripe about in any Sarah Vowell book, and that’s true for The Partly Cloudy Patriot as well.  I think I counted eleven cusswords in the whole book, mostly where she’s quoting someone.  There are some interesting pictures, although not every chapter has one.  And if your political viewpoint is staunch right-wing, you probably should give this book a pass.

    The Partly Cloudy Patriot was a quick and easy read, so if you have a book report due in two days in your high school Civics class and you haven’t even started reading anything yet, this may be your saving grace.

    8 Stars.  Take the Cannoli and Assassination Vacation remain in my library.  Hopefully it won’t take another five years to read one or both of them.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee - Dee Brown

   1970; 451 pages.  Full Title : Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West.  New Author? : Yes.  Genre : Non-Fiction; Native American History; US History.  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

    Back when I was a kid, I vaguely recall watching a Walt Disney “made for TV” movie about Custer’s Last Stand and the sole survivor of the 7^th Cavalry force, a horse ridden by Captain Myles Keogh named Comanche.

    The horse really did survive the battle (you can read about him in Wikipedia here), but obviously the storyline is completely fictional.  For the time (1958), Disney did a decent job of balancing the tale – which portrayed both Keogh and an Indian youth (played by a very young Sal Mineo) in an equally positive light.

    Alas, it was necessary to have some bloodthirsty Indian kill off Keogh in the battle, which led to the only scene from the movie that has stayed with me all these years.  The horse Comanche, enraged by its master’s slaying, in turn stomps the Indian warrior to death.  While all the other Indians just stand around, watching passively.

    It occurs to me that Custer’s Last Stand is pretty much all I know about the Indian wars that spanned the second half of the 19^th century.  And that all those John Wayne cowboys-&-Indians movies were only showing us the white man’s version of the events.

    So it was eye-opening to read about what went on from the Indian’s point-of-view.  In Dee Brown’s book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

What’s To Like...

    Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee consists of 19 chapters,, plus a short introduction by Dee Brown.  The first chapter is a quick synopsis of how the Indians in the eastern half of the US fared between the time the first white settlers came ashore until 1860, when the white man began crossing the Mississippi River into the Great Plains in huge numbers.

    Each subsequent chapter features a different tribe or war chief, and starts off with a “current events around the world” prologue which gives the reader a perspective of the events about to unfold.  There are also 49 photographs, mostly portraits of the various Indian leaders in the struggle.  At the end, there’s a brief biography of Dee Brown, which is worth taking time to read, plus sections for Notes, Bibliography, and Index.

    I recognized a lot of the US army characters.  In addition to Custer, the Civil War generals William Sherman and Philip Sheridan play major roles, and both were royal a$$holes to the Indians.  Kit Carson was initially sympathetic to the Indians, but eventually turned into their foe as well. The names of the Indian leaders were less familiar to me.  Here’s a partial list of them, see how many you’ve heard of: Tecumseh, Pontiac, Red Cloud, Manuelito, Roman Nose, Black Kettle, Ely Parker, Cochise, Geronimo, Victorio, Captain Jack, Satanta, Quanah Parker, Lone Wolf, Gall, Chief Joseph, and Ouray.

    I was surprised to learn that Custer’s Last Stand wasn’t the only time the Indians won.  The Fetterman Massacre won a whole war for them, with the US abandoning several forts and withdrawing from Indian territory, at least temporarily.  The Plains Indians also formed alliances with other tribes to fight the American army, which I never knew.  There’s a brief reference to the origin of scalping, which I had heard before.  And since I’ve spent time in Ponca City, Oklahoma, it was enlightening to read about the resistance put up by the Ponca Indian tribe.

    The book closes with a chapter devoted to Wounded Knee, as one last pitiful band of Indians tries making a dash to freedom, deluded in the belief that by performing the Ghost Dance, all the white people would disappear.  Their flight, in the dead of winter, is mercilessly snuffed out, and the final photograph in the book shows the corpse of the Indian leader Big Foot, after he’d frozen to death during the escape.  It was the winter of 1890.  In 2007, a eponymous movie was made based on Dee Brown’s book; it won 6 Emmy awards and 17 nominations.

Excerpts...

    “My God and my mother live in the West, and I will not leave them.  It is a tradition of my people that we must never cross the three rivers – the Grande, the San Juan, the Colorado.  Nor could I leave the Chuska Mountains.  I was born there.  I shall remain.  I have nothing to lose but my life, and that they can come and take whenever they please, but I will not move.  I have never done any wrong to the Americans or the Mexicans.  I have never robbed.  If I am killed, innocent blood will be shed.”  (loc. 592)

    Crow Creek on the Missouri River was the site chosen for the Santee reservation.  The soil was barren, rainfall scanty, wild game scarce, and the alkaline water unfit for drinking.  Soon the surrounding hills were covered with graves; of the 1,300 Santees brought there in 1863, less than a thousand survived their first winter.

    Among the visitors to Crow Creek that year was a young Teton Sioux.  He looked with pity upon his Santee cousins and listened to their stories of the Americans who had taken their land and driven them away.  Truly, he thought, that nation of white men is like a spring freshet that overruns its banks and destroys all who are in its path.  Soon they would take the buffalo country unless the hearts of the Indians were strong enough to hold it.  He resolved that he would fight to hold it.  His name was Tatanka Yotanka, the Sitting Bull.  (loc. 1120)

Kindle Details...

    Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee at present sells for $10.99 at Amazon, but I’ve seen it discounted several times over the last couple of years.  Amazon offers about a dozen other Dee Brown e-books - some fiction, some non-fiction, all historical tales set either in the Wild West or the Civil War - and in the $5.99-$10.99 price range.   Alternatively, you can get BMH@WK bundled with two other of Dee Brown’s Native American-themed books, Creek Mary’s Blood and The Fetterman Massacre, for $23.99.

I shall not be there.  I shall rise and pass.  Bury my heart at Wounded Knee (Stephen Vincent Benet).  (loc 116)

    I don’t have any quibbles about Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.  The worst I can say is that the chapters sometimes felt repetitive, but that was due to the US army having only one way to deal with the Indians, which was:

   a.) greet them,

   b.) offer to buy their land,

   c.) make them sign some sort of treaty, written in English,

   d.) change the treaty when back in Washington,

   e.) tell them to move to a barren reservation, or be killed.

    The Indians knew they were outnumbered, out-gunned, out-industrialized, and about to be starved to death, no matter what choices they made.  When a hunter-gatherer society encounters an agrarian/industrial society, the latter inevitably annihilates the former.  The outcome here was inevitable; all parties knew it.  But we whites didn't have to be so brutal about it.

    A couple bonus excerpts, to show what the Indians were up against:

    In 1860 there were probably 300,000 Indians in the United States and Territories, most of them living west of the Mississippi.  According to varying estimates, their numbers had been reduced by one-half to two-thirds since the arrival of the first settlers in Virginia and New England.  The survivors were now pressed between expanding white populations on the East and along the Pacific coasts – more than thirty million Europeans and their descendants.  (loc. 247)

    Of the 3,700,000 buffalo destroyed from 1872 through 1874, only 150,000 were killed by Indians. (loc. 4101)

    9½ Stars.  In 1972, one of my college dorm-mates was from the San Carlos Apache Indian reservation, which gets mentioned in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.  IIRC, we made a couple visits there over the course of the year, and the two things I remember were: a.) the warm hospitality we long-haired white students were given, and b.) the abject poverty of some of the Apaches, including an elderly woman who lived in what was little more than an outside guest room with branches for a roof.

    I think sometimes the casinos are the Great Spirit’s revenge for what America has done to the Indian nations.