Category: Reviews

On August 11, 2013, my wife and I were eagerly settling in at the Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center—popularly known as “The Kate”—in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, truly pumped for the upcoming show that evening with Marty Balin, the primary founder of the groundbreaking psychedelic rock group Jefferson Airplane, one of its principal lead vocalists and songwriters, and an indisputable icon of the sixties San Francisco music scene. But when he took the stage with his band, Marty clearly was not pleased. The Kate is a wonderful, intimate venue, a gorgeous little theater with a capacity of only 285, the sightline and acoustics great from any angle. But what Marty spotted from his vantage point was the number of seats that remained unoccupied, and you could tell it put him in a sour mood from the get-go. About midway through the show, before he launched into the tune “Miracles”—a top hit from Jefferson Starship, the ‘70s band that was a direct descendant of the Airplane—he snarkily advised his mostly greying audience that he usually saved this one for the encore, but he would go ahead and do it now in case anyone had to split and go check in on the babysitter. The collective wince that went around the room was palpable.

But he sounded fantastic. Magnificent, actually. If you closed your eyes, you would think that sweet, soulful tenor that hit every high note effortlessly was being projected from the lips of  the dynamic 23-year-old powerhouse who created the Airplane back in ’65 rather than the dour, 71-year-old emblem of the disillusioned that stood before us. I tried to tell him that, too, in the sparsely attended meet and greet that followed the show, but it was not received as intended. “Man, you sounded amazing,” I gushed. “If I was in another room I would have thought the singer was still in his twenties!” Marty regarded me cooly. “I’m not old,” he grumbled. “I’m still young.”

Marty was fooling himself, of course, but he was indeed young once upon a time, in a magical place called San Francisco that became the spiritual and geographical epicenter for a profound generational shift that was identified most prominently by youth and rebellion. Back then, he was a musical wizard of sorts who conjured up an assortment of other outsize talents that coalesced into a remarkable supergroup which later churned out tunes that defined and then transcended a singular genre of rock ‘n roll that would come to serve as a soundtrack for the zeitgeist of the times. Coming down from an all-night acid trip at Woodstock, the ethereally beautiful Grace Slick boldly proclaimed to an early morning audience, “It’s a new dawn.” And for a little while, at least, it seemed that way. It’s impossible to consider the phenomenon of the hippie counterculture and landmark moments of the mid-to-late sixties—from the Summer of Love to Altamont—without the iconography of Jefferson Airplane decorating the scenery, so deeply did the band cut a groove that inextricably bound it to the cultural and musical landscape of those years. And there’s no doubt that Marty’s fierce, towering vocals on “Volunteers” characterized the hard rock anthem of that epoch: “Look what’s happening out in the streets … Got a revolution, got to revolution …”

In a highly ambitious attempt at a single-volume definitive history of the Airplane—as well as all the many offshoots, collaborations, and solo endeavors it spawned—acclaimed music journalist Jeff Tamarkin knits together extensive interviews with exhaustive research to turn out Got a Revolution!:The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane [2003], a fast-paced, entertaining, if cliché-ridden and uneven account that succeeds more often than it falls short. That’s a mouthful, but then so is the book and the musical sensation that it chronicles.

And Tamarkin gets right to it. Conspicuous in its absence is a socio-history of the distinctive 1960s San Francisco scene that birthed the Airplane. Thus, readers unfamiliar with the cultural milieu of the pot-smoking hippies who were denizens of Haight-Ashbury and environs, as well as the antiwar politics of protest that vehemently stapled an element of rage to mantras of “peace, love, and drugs,” will come to this book with a decided disadvantage. The author turns first to Marty, who not only selected musicians for the Airplane but went on to promote it at a nightclub he co-owned called The Matrix that featured local groups such as The Doors, The Grateful Dead, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. The house band was Marty’s band. The first recruit was rhythm guitarist Paul Kantner. Lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen was next. The original bassist was replaced by Jorma’s buddy Jack Casady. Drummers came and went, but the longest lasting and most consequential was Spencer Dryden. The initial female vocalist was Signe Anderson, who left after having a baby. She was replaced by Grace Slick, who changed the entire dynamic of the band.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A former model and debutante, Slick brought good looks and a witty, wiseass stage persona to the game, as well as her soaring mezzo-soprano vocals that not simply attached a signature sound to Jefferson Airplane but came to define 1960s psychedelic rock. Grace also brought with her two tracks from her former band with her ex-husband, The Great Society, which would become big hits for the Airplane: “Somebody to Love,” and “White Rabbit,” a hallucinogenic homage to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland brimming with surreal imagery and not-so-subtle inferences to LSD, penned by Grace after an acid trip of her own. Grace’s intellectual depth and songwriting talent would prove a big influence on the band. But so too would her erratic personality.

It wasn’t long before factions formed and Marty lost control of his own band. Marty was a new-fashioned crooner of sorts, whose dulcet voice was wrapped around ballads and love songs. As the tunes took on a harder edge, the others came to reject Marty’s influence as poppy schlock. After a series of bed-hopping adventures, Grace settled in with Paul, and they had their own ideas about the direction the music should take. Jorma—whose first love was the blues—and his friend Jack formed another bloc. Spencer refused to play the game and just grew alienated. In time, he was fired. It was kind of a revolving door with drummers.

Tamarkin does a pretty competent job of animating the personalities involved so the reader gets to know them, but it’s evident that he had far more material on some than the others. We get up close and personal with Paul and Grace, replete with anecdotes galore, but there’s less nuance in his sketches of Jorma and the rest of the gang. Still, as a fan who has long admired the band, I found it discouraging to peek in on them behind the scenes. Once they tasted success, the Airplane purchased a seventeen-room mansion at 2400 Fulton Street in the heart of Haight-Ashbury for use as a communal residence and office space. There they proceeded to act like a bunch of spoiled rich kids with a Dionysian penchant for wallowing in sex, drugs, alcohol, and materialism. If the sex and drugs resonated on the streets, their behavior was otherwise vastly dissimilar to the ethic of the hippie counterculture they ostensibly represented. They exhibited almost no authentic sense of social consciousness. They had guns. They had a passion for expensive toys and reckless behavior. They were consumed with petty jealousies and rivalries. Their protest politics descended into a blind devotion to Mao’s China.

Of all of them, Grace comes off the worst: selfish, egotistical, unruly, provocative, grandstanding, a raging alcoholic given to violence—she once attacked Paul with a sword. The Grace who was fired from Jefferson Starship in 1978 for goose-stepping to mock a German audience was the same Grace at Fulton Street, just an older version. Some of her antics were entertaining—like when she schemed to slip acid into President Nixon’s drink when Tricia Nixon’s Finch college alumnae invite to a formal White House tea party included the former Grace Wing; she never got past security. Some were just crazy, like when she set out on an inebriated high speed street race with Jorma that sent her off the road into an embankment; the car’s driver side was crushed, but with no seat belt and the luck of a drunk, she incurred only minor injuries. In between such exploits, Grace delighted in promiscuity. Even in an age when free love was common, Grace took it to extremes, and she seemed incapable of fidelity to anyone. She managed to bed down with everyone in the Airplane—except Marty. Many observed that when the two performed together it was as if they were making love before a cast of thousands, but offstage Marty demonstrated no interest in her physically. When asked in an interview if he had ever slept with Grace, Marty famously said that he wouldn’t even let her—well, no need to repeat it here, you can Google it!

If Grace’s character seems to scrape the bottom, Marty’s floats near the top. Hardly a burly fellow, it was Marty who leaped off the stage at Altamont to protect a concertgoer being attacked by a Hell’s Angel, only to be beaten unconscious for his heroic intervention. If perhaps jealous of the way Grace seized the spotlight, and increasingly dispirited as he was sidelined by the others, his devotion to the band never flagged. But ultimately internal tensions got to him, and in 1971 he was the first to walk away. A year later, Jefferson Airplane was history.

Given the talent, conflicting ambitions, and disagreement over musical directions, it is less surprising that the Airplane crashed than that it lasted as long as it did. But the band didn’t really dissolve as much as it divided. Jorma and Jack’s side project, Hot Tuna, became their full time gig and still endures today. Some terrific collaborations by Grace and Paul—my favorite is Baron von Tollbooth & the Chrome Nun—eventually evolved into Jefferson Starship. Marty contributed one song to their first album, the beautiful love ballad “Caroline,” and later became a permanent member of the new band. And that first effort, Dragonfly, ranks up there with some of the best of the Airplane. One of the finest tracks on that album is “Ride the Tiger,” which contains lyrics that boldly predict: “Look to the summer of seventy-five … All the world is gonna come alive.” It was not to be. The era of the sixties—which some would date from JFK’s 1963 assassination to Nixon’s resignation in 1974—was done. Disco was ahead. LSD was passé; coke was the new cool. And while long-haired zombies on quaaludes masqueraded as hippies, stumbling through the garish excesses of a far less promising new dawn, it was a look, not a lifestyle. It wasn’t until the final death knell of Reagan’s election and the murder of John Lennon that reality sunk in. Jefferson Starship put out a couple of solid albums but then fell into a steep decline. A sad caricature of it—on and off, with and without Grace—dubbed just “Starship” continues until today. I’m not a fan.

Tamarkin should have closed out the volume when the Airplane ended, but instead he determined to chronicle every twist and turn of the successor bands and the various solo efforts ad infinitum—or at least until the 2003 publication date. The result is a diminished writing quality and a narrative that reads more like an extended Wikipedia entry. Disputes among members continue, personnel come and go, but it becomes a blur as the author himself seems to want to plow through all the years ahead and finally be done with it. It is unfortunate because the balance of the book detracts from the achievements of earlier chapters.

When I say that I can’t remember when I first started digging the Airplane, I mean that quite literally, because their music and their vibe was so entangled with my then concurrent pursuit of altering consciousness that recollections of those days are a bit murky, to say the least. But it must have been sometime around 1972, when my fifteen year old self would get high and then blast FM radio, which treated me to “White Rabbit” and “Lather” and—my all-time favorite—“Wooden Ships.” And I started to buy their albums. Of course, by then the Airplane had disbanded, although my voyage of discovery had just begun!

I still own a large collection of Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship, Hot Tuna, and various collaborations, most on the original vinyl, some on CD. (And yes, the vinyl sound is vastly superior!) I made a point of listening to all of it chronologically—with some help from Spotify to fill in the blanks—in the course of reading Got a Revolution! The majority of it holds up admirably, especially the Airplane albums Surrealistic Pillow and Volunteers, some of the Kantner-Slick efforts, Jefferson Starship’s Dragonfly and Red Octopus, and much of the Hot Tuna catalog. I never stopped being a fan.

In 1989, Marty, Paul, Jorma, Jack, and Grace briefly reunited Jefferson Airplane, put out a new album, and embarked on a tour. My wife and I saw them live at Lake Compounce Festival Park in Bristol, Connecticut on September 4, 1989—with Hot Tuna as an opening act. I will never forget the thrill I experienced standing in the first rows under the stage with chills running up and down my spine during their live performance of “Wooden Ships.”

In 1996, the Airplane—including Spencer Dryden—was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and they performed live, sans Grace, who sat out the ceremony. Grace had retired shortly after the ’89 tour, and has since declared that rock is a “young person’s game.” She quit drinking and mellowed out markedly. As this review goes to press, Grace—who casts herself as “The Queen of Acid Rock and Art”—passes her time at 86 as a painter of rock legends and characters from Alice in Wonderland, with her work earning critical praise. Jorma and Jack, both in their 80’s, continue to tour with Hot Tuna. I have sat in on several of their shows in intimate venues; they never disappoint. Paul Kantner died at 74 on January 28, 2016, in a weird coincidence on the very same day that Signe Anderson passed away at the same age. Marty Balin died at 76 in 2018. In later interviews, he made clear that his recollections of the Airplane were bittersweet. There’s no doubt that he never really got the credit he deserved. My memory of him at The Kate, so downcast, yet lingers.

It’s been sixty-one years since the 1965 launch of Jefferson Airplane, but their music never gets old. Despite the shortcomings with Tamarkin’s book, I would still recommend it. And don’t forget to spin their albums while you’re reading.

He was the most famous man in America, but he wasn’t even an American. The United States was a young country, but he was an old man. Many of the key figures of the Revolution and the early Republic were gone, most notably Washington and Hamilton, but yet many remained, including Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and then-President of the United States Monroe. And, perhaps most remarkably, he himself not simply remained but endured, even thrived, the last surviving Revolutionary War major general, advanced in years and slowed a bit by his walking cane, but yet spry enough to unhesitatingly accept Monroe’s invitation to visit as “The Nation’s Guest”—first braving the month-long three thousand mile transatlantic crossing on a packet ship from France to New York City, then to set out on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the American Revolution for what would become a thirteenth month tour of the United States that would cover some six thousand miles by steamboat, carriage, and horseback. The year was 1824, and his arrival sparked a widespread contagious joyous frenzy that turned into a kind of Beatlemania a full one hundred forty years before Beatlemania was a thing. He was the Marquis de Lafayette.

Many who are familiar with this era are aware at least in passing of Lafayette’s visit, but journalist Ryan L. Cole has put the spotlight on what will certainly be ranked as the definitive study of this event with The Last Adieu: Lafayette’s Triumphant Return, the Echoes of Revolution, and the Gratitude of the Republic [2025], a meticulously researched, well-written, if sometimes dull chronicle of a singular moment in American history. I used to marvel at what it must have been like for Lafayette to reconnect with the likes of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson at the very twilight of their long lives, but in this fine work the author demonstrates that these colorful episodes, while worth dwelling upon, are the least important parts of his story. Instead, cleverly positioning Lafayette as a kind of Rip Van Winkle character, Cole treats the reader to a series of snapshots of thirteen colonies that in a half century have grown into a mature nation now comprised of twenty-four states (and vast unorganized territories), as seen through the eyes of the indefatigable Frenchman as he spends more than a year traversing thousands of miles and stepping at least once on the soil of each and every one of those two dozen states!

Despite the heritage myths that have long clung to textbooks, American independence could never have been achieved without the decisive military and economic support of the French, still smarting over their disastrous loss of North American territory to their ancient enemy, the British, in the Seven Years War, known as the French and Indian War on this side of the pond. Lafayette became the face of French intervention here. An idealistic young nobleman chasing military glory when he volunteered to assist the colonists in their rebellion, he became at nineteen the youngest major general of the Continental Army, incurred a serious leg wound, and served courageously and with great distinction throughout the course of the war. Along the way, he bonded with Washington, who came to treat him like a son.

Back in France, Lafayette, through a remarkable sequence of maneuvers and astonishingly good luck, managed over the years to survive taking a leading role in the French Revolution as well as dodging the guillotine when the Revolution turned against him, enduring five years in Austrian and Prussian prisons, then tiptoeing through Napoleon’s tenure and the Bourbon Restoration, and finally navigating fierce political crosscurrents and clandestine conspiracies during the reign of  Napoleon III. Through it all, he conducted himself with great dignity and remained loyal to his ideals. Still, by 1824, when President James Monroe extended his invitation, Lafayette was at sixty-seven—an old man in those days—widowed, broke, and recently defeated for reelection in the Chamber of Deputies. But he did not hesitate to embark on yet another adventure!

For the reader, it is slow-going before that adventure gets underway, as Cole devotes nearly one hundred pages—about a quarter of the entire book—to Lafayette’s storied biography and the long preparations for the voyage, before “The Nation’s Guest” finally reached the nation’s shores. The United States Lafayette encountered upon his return was almost another universe compared to the one he had departed decades before. From his arrival in New York, cheering crowds and celebrations accompanied him everywhere, and he was poignantly greeted again and again by the white-haired thinning ranks of Revolutionary War veterans. Cole is at his best as he brilliantly recreates the cities and towns and hamlets of 1820s America and, through Lafayette’s own sharp recollections, contrasts these with an earlier time when the notion of the United States was but an uncertain dream that blood—including Lafayette’s own—was once spilled in fond if tenuous hopes for success. Students of American history will savor these moments.

But as the great man’s journey proceeds, the blur of repetition in a succession of strikingly similar welcomes from place to place can grow tedious, especially as Cole has deemed no detail, no matter how trivial, worthy of omission. Moreover, while we naturally crave to learn more about the famous lives that are met in his travels—such as Jefferson and Madison and Adams—the author frequently devotes a page or even a page-and-a-half to minor characters who cross Lafayette’s path, sometimes wearying tangents that can feel like footnotes in a David Foster Wallace work that are here tangled up in the narrative.

But if there are weak points, there are a host of strong ones, as well. My favorite chapter is devoted to Lafayette’s time in Alabama among the indigenous Creek, whose dwindling numbers attempt to strike an impossible balancing act by clinging to much of their traditional ways while struggling to safeguard their independence through awkward attempts at assimilation with the rapacious Americans, hungry for their lands and all too eager to defraud them. Alas, like their kin in Georgia, most would lose it all in the not-too-distant future, forced West as Indian removal became a popular mechanism for the expansion of white settlement.

This is a reminder, as Cole underscores elsewhere, that Lafayette’s excursion also coincided with the end of another era, as Monroe—with one foot still in the eighteenth century—presided over the final months of his presidency against the backdrop of the 1824 election that would pit the old guard of John Quincy Adams against the emerging rough brand of new politics attached to Andrew Jackson. Lafayette refused to take sides here, but elsewhere he was adamant about something that continued to appall him: the human chattel slavery that was fading in the north just as it had become inextricable from the economic engine of the southern states. He made no secret of his disgust at the peculiar institution, particularly during his tearful reunion at Monticello with his old friend Jefferson, who, long reconciled to the moral contradictions, served up eloquent platitudes tempered with hope that the next generation would devise a way to deal with this unfortunate wolf-by-the-ears conundrum. In retrospect, we know that they will: at Fort Sumter and Appomattox. Of course, these days historians acknowledge that what we usually celebrate as triumphs for the new nation were at the same time tragedies for the indigenous and the enslaved.

But for white Americans at the time, looking back a half century to the Revolution and peering ahead at whatever uncertainties might loom in their future, Lafayette’s presence further cemented a national identity and stoked a peacetime patriotic revival that was perhaps like nothing ever seen before or since in the United States. It was to be a real positive for Lafayette, as well: not only for the mountains of accolades that boosted his self-esteem, which had in recent years declined along with his fortunes, but also as a grateful nation found ways to restore his financial health. Reinvigorated, he returned to France and in the coming years became again—incredibly—another leading figure in yet another revolution that led to the overthrow of King Charles X. When he passed away in 1834, Lafayette had outlived every American Founder except James Madison. Despite my quibbles, The Last Adieu deserves high marks for its significant contribution to the historiography and its thought-provoking analysis of an America that once was.

NOTE: I received this book as part of an Early Reviewer’s program.

Imagine that you were brought up in a home that hosted a large extended family that was multiracial and multicultural. Your parents were white, of European ancestry, but through marriage and adoption you had a Native American uncle, an aunt who was born in China, a Mexican cousin, and an African American brother, all who resided under one roof. Your childhood was marked by a hardscrabble endurance against the elements in an environment that was sometimes harsh and even dangerous. Every member of the household made critical contributions to the family’s success in a near constant struggle for survival. One day, later in life, something happened to you—perhaps a head injury—that left you with profound memory loss. You could clearly recall events of your upbringing, but recollections of the people involved—with the exception of your father—had dimmed dramatically. You could still remember your mother, but only indistinctly. The rest of the family existed only as vague shapes, bit players who emerged from the shadowy recesses of your mind now and again, their key parts in your nurture almost entirely erased. Later, looking back, you would claim with confidence that your formative years were shaped solely by your white father.

True story? In a way. It’s actually a kind of an allegorical tale of how our collective memory of the American West has been so distorted by books, film, and TV that what still clings to the minds of many is an image of a mostly empty landscape of big skies and heroic white men wearing white hats—like John Wayne—taciturn, rugged individualists who pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps to conquer a hostile, untamed land. And somehow, over time, the rich constellation of the remaining cast of characters who once walked that same earth—women, the indigenous, Mexicans, and others—faded until they became, if not entirely invisible, little more than bit players who put in cameos of hardly any consequence.

The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier [2026], a stunning achievement by noted historian Megan Kate Nelson, proves a long overdue remedy for this stubbornly pernicious amnesia with an exciting, even page-turning, panoramic history of the American West that restores the legacy of so many who were by accident or design largely expunged from chronicles of the past. Blending the “journey motif” literary device with rigorous scholarship, the author—in a series of roughly chronological episodes that often overlap—deftly guides the reader to follow in the footsteps of seven specific individuals who each not only left an essential mark on the West but are likewise emblematic of others who once walked alongside. A gifted storyteller who seems incapable of writing a dull paragraph, Nelson rekindles moments of passion, adventure, glory, and tragedy that followed Lewis & Clark to Wounded Knee, true accounts that via her talented pen somehow turn out to be more thrilling than much of the fiction imagined in dime store novels or blockbuster flicks.

Women are conspicuous in their absence in nearly all accounts of the West, just footnotes in the literature, and in popular culture reduced to cardboard cut-outs of pioneer wives or saloon girls—but always of solid Anglo stock, of course. So it is particularly welcome to find that four of Nelson’s chosen seven are female, and of those, three are people of color. Only one—Sacajawea—is familiar to most Americans today. But Nelson challenges our traditional patronizing portrait of this so-called “good Indian”—who helped guide the heroic white folks of the Corps of Discovery—to spotlight her crucial role in an expedition that may not have succeeded as it did without her.

Born an Agaidika Shoshone along what is today the Idaho-Montana border, at twelve Sacajawea was captured in a raid by a rival tribe, the Hidatsa, and force marched to present-day North Dakota. At thirteen, she was sold to a Quebecois trapper named Toussaint Charbonneau who made her one of his wives. When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark first encountered her in 1804, she was a pregnant sixteen-year-old. They needed a reliable guide and interpreter, and to that end Charbonneau was hired, who brought along his Shoshone-speaking wife. It is unlikely anyone ever asked this teenager if she wanted to be a wife or a mother or a blazer of wilderness trails, but nevertheless, shortly after giving birth, she set out to lead the expedition thousands of miles, toting her son in a cradleboard strapped to her back. Stripped of the caricature imposed upon her as the rare Native American female to actually earn mention in textbooks, Nelson’s Sacajawea was a flesh and blood young woman who was central to their mission as she navigated difficult terrain, identified edible plants, rescued their precious journals from a capsizing boat, and—perhaps most significantly—as an Amerindian traveling with an infant telegraphed peaceful intentions and ensured the safety of the group while facilitating trade with tribes they encountered along the way. She was clearly vital to their efforts; she was mentioned in excess of one hundred times in the journals! Still, she was never compensated; Charbonneau was instead paid for bringing her along. Upon her untimely death some years later, Clark adopted her son Jean Baptiste, who would coincidentally cross paths with Jim Beckwourth, who also has a starring role in The Westerners, decades down the road. And it turns out that Jean Baptiste—half French, half indigenous, raised by an American—was far more typical of the multiracial, multicultural frontier than the white men wearing white hats we were directed to idolize.

Maria Gertrudis Barceló is another fascinating character.  Nearly a third of today’s continental United States was once part of Mexico. Largely through violence—annexation, war, and purchase under pressure—more than half of Mexico’s original territory was incorporated into the US, along with something like one hundred thousand Mexicans. One of them was Gertrudis Barceló, a fiercely independent woman—in a culture that permitted that—who ran a vast gambling operation and owned her own saloon in Sante Fe. Both entrepreneurial and opportunistic, when New Mexico changed hands in the Mexican War, Gertrudis Barceló’s operations continued unabated and she died one of the wealthiest residents in the region. Yet, in traditional histories of the American West, you would likely never learn that Gertrudis Barceló or thousands of other Mexicans who were absorbed into the United States ever existed.

There’s also Polly Bemis, a tiny but remarkably intrepid woman who was born in China, sold as a slave, smuggled to San Francisco, and eventually ended up in a mining camp in Idaho. Under the best of circumstances, in this era the Chinese in America were frequently subject to racism, exclusion, and violence, but somehow Polly persevered, winning her freedom and going on to run her own boarding house. Another is Ella Watson, a Wyoming pioneer who met a tragic end, and then suffered the further indignity of having her reputation sullied after death by being branded “Cattle Kate,” a rustler and woman of ill repute who inspired the Zane Grey novel The Maverick Queen that I read some years ago. But it turns out that the Cattle Kate persona was completely fabricated, and rather than outlaw, Ella was a homesteader who ran afoul of a land baron who sought her property and its water rights.

Of all the principal figures of The Westerners, the most intriguing could be Jim Beckwourth, an extraordinary fellow who instantly reminded me of Jack Crabb, the protagonist of Thomas Berger’s novel Little Big Man later portrayed by Dustin Hoffman on the big screen, although in real life Beckwourth—narcissistic, amoral, and manipulative—comes off as far less sympathetic than the fictional Crabb. While tall tales are so intermingled with facts that it is difficult to fix upon a truly reliable biography of Beckwourth, Nelson skillfully sketches out a nuanced portrait of a man whose incredible life is symbolic of the American West. Born into plantation slavery in Virginia but unusually favored by his white father, Beckwourth’s darker complexion, an obstacle in the east, turned into an advantage on the frontier, where he could inhabit a variety of different worlds. And he did. A fur trapper, mountain man, trader, and explorer—these are just a few of his various occupations—Beckwourth demonstrated much courage, resourcefulness, and dedication to his own self-interest, seeking his fortune while collecting and abandoning a series of wives and paramours along the way. One of those wives was indigenous, and he lived with her and her Apsáalooke Crow tribe for a time. But that experience did not dissuade him from a later stint as an army scout caught up in the infamous Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 that saw hundreds of encamped Cheyenne—predominantly women, children, and infants—butchered by soldiers. Beckwourth went on to write a book about his exploits, and died an old man of natural causes. If there’s a moral to the story, it could be that many who survived the brutal challenges of the frontier were not only the fittest but the most unprincipled.

An exception to that rule could be Little Wolf (Ó’kôhómôxháahketa), Sweet Medicine Chief of the Northern Cheyenne, arguably the most admirable of Nelson’s seven, who consistently acted only for the interests of his people, and never for himself. The greatest tragedy of the West is the fate of the indigenous that once included hundreds of tribes and millions of inhabitants, their numbers already reduced and lifeways dramatically altered well before the time of Lewis & Clark. Europeans unintentionally brought to the shores epidemics that devastated virgin populations. And not only disease touched them: horses and firearms first introduced by the conquistadors forever changed their way of life. In what would become the United States, eastern settlements that grew into towns and cities gradually forced relocation of many tribes west, displacing those who came before, even prior to when forced “Indian removal” became official US policy. As it was, spread out among so many distinct tribal groups with divided loyalties, they never really had a chance: manifest destiny, the transcontinental railroad, the cavalry, and especially the conviction that the west belonged exclusively to white settlers to do as they pleased with it, would doom their independence. Little Wolf, born when Jean Baptiste would have been only about fifteen years old, could not have known that within his lifespan Native Americans would never again roam free, but would be confined to reservations ever after. The saga of Little Wolf’s valiant struggle against this inevitably represents some of Nelson’s finest work here.

Finally, for those who are looking for white guys, Nelson gives us Ovando Hollister, a Yankee with a commitment to abolition who was raised in a Shaker community and went west to seek his fortune, then on to fight for Union and emancipation in the Civil War. Later, he became an influential journalist. But while he championed freedom for blacks, he was consistently hostile towards the indigenous. He had no objection to Sand Creek, and even came to Beckwourth’s defense in the press, glossing over the atrocities to object that he was unfairly maligned for his skin color.

But there’s another white man who looms over Nelson’s narrative who is not one of her central characters: Frederick Jackson Turner. Three years after another massacre, this time at Wounded Knee, Turner presented his paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” which—as Nelson points out in her Prologue—was the genesis of the frontier myth that the West was fundamental to the cultivation of our national identity, preordained for white Americans to dominate in a crusade to supplant savagery with civilization. For well over a century, Turner’s thesis has overshadowed the historiography, as well as popular culture, and is principally responsible for that very amnesia identified at the outset of this discussion. It was presented to me as received wisdom when I was an undergrad in the 1980s. And it lingers still.

The Westerners is an effective rebuttal to Turner, whose thesis is not only flawed but in fact mistaken, and even harmful. Sure, there were plenty of white Americans who were, for better or for worse, significant to the development of what would become the western part of the United States. But there were lots of others—among them blacks, Mexicans, Asians, and especially Native Americans—whose contributions were just as critical. Millions, in fact. Sadly, most of their identities were erased. If we can give a pass to the movies for colorful stereotypes, and for only carving out screen time for the white guys with the white hats, the truth is that the texts from my grade school classroom were—if decidedly duller—not that far removed from the celluloid. The likes of Maria Gertrudis Barceló, Polly Bemis, Little Wolf, and so many more simply did not make the cut. In a superlative, meticulously researched work that will appeal to scholars as well as delight a general audience, Megan Kate Nelson succeeds brilliantly in resurrecting not only these lives, but the spirits of a multitude long lost to time.

I reviewed this previous book by the same author, here:

Review of: Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America, by Megan Kate Nelson

 

Back in 2011, I was visiting Philly, where my daughter lived in those days, but the timing of my trip was all about the opening day of the exhibit of the Tarim Basin mummies at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Fans of the history of the storied Silk Road know of the Tarim Basin as once hosting a number of oases that serviced caravans in the otherwise forbidding Taklamakan Desert, now located in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in the People’s Republic of China. Naturally mummified, the collection of desiccated remains that was scheduled for display at the museum that day are incredibly old—some dating back about four thousand years—but what’s more astonishing is their ancestry: an isolated population of Ancient North Eurasians that once spoke Tocharian, an extinct branch of the Indo-European language family.

To put that in perspective, these days in excess of forty percent of the world—more than three billion people—speak some kind of Indo-European language, including German, Italian, Russian, French, Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Persian, Greek, Irish, Albanian, Lithuanian, Armenian, and the English employed in the writing of this review. Tocharian was once part of that family! It is believed that all these languages (and hundreds of others) are descended from what once was a common tongue called Proto-Indo-European (PIE).

There is no extant record of PIE, but its elements have been partially identified through linguistic reconstruction, which is a remarkable tale in itself, although perhaps a far more extraordinary one lies in tracing how it is that descendants of this proto-language are spoken today by billions of people at such distant geographies. In Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global [2025], both stories are expertly woven together in a fast-moving, well-written, if sometimes flawed narrative by science journalist Laura Spinney, which serves as a solid introduction to the global implications of Proto-Indo-European for the past and the present.

I first became intrigued by the Indo-European languages some years ago during my deep dive into the classics and the Bronze Age Mycenaean Greeks who peopled Homer’s Iliad. The Mycenaean script was first discovered (if not identified at the time) in the ruins of the Minoan Palace of Knossos on Crete in 1900 by British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans, on tablets tagged as Linear B to distinguish it from the other, earlier script found on other tablets that were labeled as Linear A. Linear B also turned up elsewhere on the Greek mainland, but no one could decipher the strange symbols. More than a half century later, Michael Ventris and John Chadwick cracked the code and determined that Linear B was in fact a form of ancient Greek, in use by the Mycenaeans who conquered the Minoans. The Linear B syllabic script seems to have evolved from the still undeciphered Linear A, which was almost certainly Minoan and probably unrelated to Greek, and thus likely a non-Indo-European language.

There are important lessons here that have global implications. First, while the ancient Minoans and Greeks for a time utilized similar scripts, the languages recorded by these scripts were different. Second, and perhaps of even greater significance, that the Minoans learned to speak and write the Greek language of their conquerors does not imply that the two distinct peoples were otherwise related. When Greek written language reemerged after a kind of dark age that followed the collapse of the Bronze Age—one of the earliest literary works recorded was The Iliad—they wrote it down in an alphabetic script borrowed from the Phoenicians, an unrelated people who spoke Canaanite, a Semitic, non-Indo-European language. Thus, the populations that today speak Hindi, French, Albanian, or English are not by necessity genetically related to those who at one time may have overrun them and imposed an Indo-European language upon them, although they may be, and in some cases we can determine that they definitely are.

But long before this—long before there were Greeks—their Indo-European ancestors walked the earth, presumably speaking PIE. Where did they come from? We cannot be certain, but the most widely accepted theory is based upon the Kurgan hypothesis, proposed by Marija Gimbutas, which holds that nomadic pastoralists from the Pontic-Caspian steppe (now southern Ukraine and Russia) moved south and west in the 4th millennium BCE and imposed their culture and language on Neolithic farmers in their paths. Kurgans are the ancient burial mounds archaeologists have linked to these steppe nomads. (Gimbutas’ later reputation suffered due to her fixation on a belief in an “Old Europe” matriarchal civilization dominated by a life-affirming Mother Goddess, which has been panned by archaeologists for lacking evidence, but the central tenets of the Kurgan hypothesis have withstood vigorous scrutiny in subsequent studies.)

Her work was revised and refined by anthropologist David Anthony, whose magnificent book—The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World [2007]—I read some years ago. Anthony argues that steppe nomad warriors, armed with domesticated horses and the advanced technology of wheeled vehicles, dominated Neolithic cultures in Europe, Anatolia, and beyond, spreading the proto-Indo-European language across continents. Paleogenetics has confirmed the likelihood that Gimbutas and Anthony were on to something, as DNA analysis has demonstrated the presence of a signature Y-chromosome (passed down by males) in modern Europeans, notably the Y-DNA haplogroup R1b that is traceable to steppe nomads. Evidence of mtDNA (the mitochondrial DNA passed down by females) in contemporary populations indicate that migrations of women from the steppes also occurred. Modern Indians are of mixed ancestry, but there too there is no mistaking the paternally inherited Y-chromosome that steppe nomads introduced thousands of years ago.

This was of course not the last time that steppe nomads put their mark on civilizations east and west—think Scythians, Huns, Turks, and Mongols—which certainly puts a lie to the “great man” historiography that dominated the textbooks of my youth, and solidly rebukes the likes of Will Durant, who with some arrogance once pronounced that civilizations rise on stoicism and fall on epicureanism. Really? How about climate change, pandemics—and invasions by steppe nomads?

Spinney deserves high marks for her review of the Kurgan hypothesis and competing theories. She is also on solid ground as she walks the reader through how it is that linguists can be certain that more than four hundred languages spoken by billions of people today—as well as a number of extinct branches of the Indo-European language family—are indeed related and must have descended from the PIE originally spoken by steppe nomads. To that end, she walks the reader through the homology of Indo-European languages to identify their linguistic kinship and common ancestry with PIE, including the correspondence of sounds, similar grammatical structures, and especially the shared vocabulary found, for instance, in ancient Sanskrit and Latin, and their modern descendants like Hindi and French.

Vocabulary that shares common ancestor words from PIE—but may sound altered today due to regular sound changes—are called Indo-European cognates. A popular example is the English “mother,” which is in Latin mater, Greek mētēr, Sanskrit mātṛ, German Mutter, Russian mat’—which share the “*mater-” PIE root. There are many other examples, including “father” which has the PIE root “*pater-” and appears as Latin pater, Sanskrit pitṛ́, Greek patḗr, French père, Spanish padre, Armenian hayr, and Irish athair. A hint of how these two words might have been pronounced in the very distant past may be detected in today’s Lithuanian—the most archaic living Indo-European language with the least sound changes, considered closest to the original PIE—with mother rendered as “motina” and father as “tėvas,” preserving in this “conservative” East Baltic tongue older sounds that changed, for instance, in Latin and English. It is not surprising that words like “mother” and “father” should remain closer to their ancient PIE roots, but there are many other examples of such cognates, although due to sound changes over thousands of years, some may not correspond as elegantly as others.

Indo-European languages are divided into either centum or satem languages according to how the sounds of the dorsal consonants (“K,” “G,” and “Y”) evolved. At one time, it was believed that there was a neat divide between western and eastern languages with centum and satem, respectively, but then Tocharian was discovered and it turned out to be something like a centum tongue, even if it’s a kind of special case. It’s complicated.

Indo-European is further categorized by its branches, and language divergence began very early on with the oldest branches of Anatolian (Hittite) and Tocharian, and later splits into Hellenic (Greek) and Indo-Iranian (Vedic Sanskrit). To my mind, perhaps most fascinating is the number of extinct languages that were once derived from PIE. The Tocharian of Central Asia is one, of course, which has no modern descendants, and actually the whole Tocharian branch is defunct. Another is its earliest, Hittite, which dates back to 1750 BCE. The Hittites, who once dominated Anatolia, modern Turkey, are famously referenced in the Hebrew Torah, and are notable in the archaeological record for the massive chariot warfare that occurred circa 1274 BCE between armies led by Hittite King Muwatalli II and the Egyptian Pharoah Ramesses II at the Battle of Kadesh, located in modern day Syria, which ended in stalemate and the world’s first recorded peace treaty! The Hittite Empire fell with the collapse of the Bronze Age, and eventually their language disappeared, as well.

Like Tocharian, the entire Anatolian branch—that once included Hittite as well as other tongues such as Luwian, Lydian, and Lycian—is entirely extinct, with no successor languages. Surviving main branches—many of which also include now vanished languages—are Indo-Iranian, Germanic, Italic, Hellenic, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Armenian, and Albanian. Of these, the largest belongs to the 1.7 billion who speak Hindi, Persian, Urdu, and Kurdish, among the more than three hundred Indo-Iranian languages. While reading Proto, I got a kick out of the fact that the guys I buy beer from at my local package store hail from the Indian state of Gujarat, and speak Gujarati—an Indo-European language! There are close to four hundred fifty living languages in the Indo-European family today, but also more than eight hundred others that no longer exist.

Proto serves as a fine introductory course on Indo-European languages and their shared PIE ancestry, although it turns into a kind of travelogue as Spinney takes the reader on a journey to various spots across the globe where IE tongues are spoken, looking to the past and present with captivating excursions into history, archaeology, linguistics, genetics, and culture. On the one hand, this makes the book far more readable—she is a very talented writer—but will leave some wanting more, especially as she exercises the author’s prerogative to devote more emphasis to certain branches of IE than to others.

There are, unfortunately, a couple of glaring errors. The first is when she repeats the discredited notion that the volcanic eruption circa 1628 BCE of Thera (modern Santorini) brought on the collapse of the Minoan civilization, and opened the door to the Mycenean Greeks [p238]. Classicists know that while the catastrophe at Thera significantly weakened the Minoan thalassocracy, Mycenaeans did not conquer Crete until circa 1450 BCE—nearly 180 years later! Worse, Spinny repeats the long-debunked canard that the Egyptian pyramids were constructed by slaves [p.195] rather than skilled, paid laborers—a notion imagined in technicolor by Cecil B. DeMille but repudiated by historians. These are, of course, just two blemishes on an otherwise fine work, but nevertheless made me want to fact-check some of her other material.

Still, those of us who thrive on breaking news in science and history will derive a great deal of enjoyment from Proto, which balances content with readability such that there is an  appeal to an academic as well as a general audience—which is an achievement worth an underscore! But those with a focus on politics rather than scholarship might not be on board. Hindu nationalists firmly reject any connection to outside cultural influences, and vehemently deny that Sanskrit and Hindi are Indo-European in origin. Perhaps they share the conceit of the ancient Athenians, who likewise imagined themselves as autochthonous?

There are political sensitivities in the People’s Republic of China, as well. Turning back to my visit to Philadelphia for the opening day exhibit of “Secrets of the Silk Road” and the Tarim mummies: in the end, at the very last minute, to my great disappointment, the Chinese government yanked permission to display the mummies; paper cut-outs of the body forms were substituted. It was never stated out loud, but we all knew the reasons were purely political. The region where the Tocharian-speaking North Eurasians once roamed was now home to the often persecuted Muslim Uyghur minority population. Any challenge to the myth of the homogeneity of a single ancient Chinese people and culture in the wider geography of the PRC is a source of anxiety to the totalitarian regime. Apparently, the double-whammy of Turkic speaking Uyghurs and archaic Indo-Europeans was just too much for the Chinese Communist Party, and they pulled the plug on showcasing the Tocharian mummies.

Later, there was a change of heart, and the mummies were restored to their exhibit cases, but by then I was hundreds of miles away and never got to see them. Yet, that episode hardly dulled my interest in the Tarim mummies, nor the Indo-European language family, and in the last fifteen years I have read fairly deeply about both. Proto is only my latest!

On June 23, 2023, as the world watched with mouths collectively agape, longtime Vladimir Putin associate Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the notorious paramilitary force known as the Wagner Group, mounted a rebellion against the Russian military leadership over its fumbling prosecution of the war in Ukraine. Wagner mercenaries captured Rostov-on-Don almost unopposed and began a slow advance towards Moscow.  This was not only the most significant challenge to Putin’s increasingly authoritarian rule, but the most consequential threat to the legitimacy of the post-Soviet state in the three decades since Boris Yeltsin used tanks to shutter the Duma to forestall his own impeachment. Then, as suddenly as it began, it was over. Prigozhin called off the mutiny, and all criminal charges were dropped as he agreed to relocate Wagner forces to Belarus. Not long after, it was reported that Putin hosted Prigozhin at the Kremlin and fences were mended among the old allies, but few believed that would be the end of the story. So, on August 23^rd—exactly two months to the day since the rebellion launched—perhaps it came as a surprise only to Prigozhin when the business jet carrying him and his associates exploded north of Moscow.

So who was Yevgeny Prigozhin? What was his actual relationship with Vladimir Putin? What role did the Wagner Group play as an extension of Russian power, not only in Ukraine but in Africa and the Middle East?  And how could the thuggish ex-con paramilitary Prigozhin rise to such prominence to make international observers—albeit briefly—wonder aloud if he would be the instrument to topple the Putin regime? In a remarkable achievement, Putin’s Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse into Mercenary Chaos [2025], international expert and Arizona State Professor of Practice Candace Rondeaux brilliantly addresses these questions and much more in an extremely well-written if dense account that is at once a kind of dual biography of Prigozhin and Putin as well as a nuanced history of post-Yeltsin Russia.

It turns out that the intersecting avenues of (pardon the inevitable alliteration) Prigozhin and Putin were to be found on the  streets of St. Petersburg, formerly Leningrad. It was there that teenage petty thief Yevgeny Prigozhin grew up to be a volent gang member who spent nearly a decade in prison before he found himself selling hot dogs alongside his mother in an open air market. Both street savvy and entrepreneurial at a fortuitous moment when a fierce, nascent capitalism served as tsar of the new Russian state, Prigozhin turned burgeoning profits first into the grocery store business, then, along with a pair of new partners, expanded into a variety of other enterprises that included the city’s first casinos. The restaurant business was next. Here the duality that marked his character was most evident—he was at once markedly intelligent and adept in his every endeavor, as well as coarse and cruel when it suited him. He hired strippers to lure in diners before word got around that the menu was superlative. And he casually meted out violence to employees who failed to live up to his expectations. Prigozhin redefined upscale dining when he remodeled a rusting hulk into a floating restaurant known as New Island that became one of St. Petersburg’s most fashionable eateries. New Island hosted key state dinners for Vladimir Putin, French president Jacques Chirac, and US president George W. Bush. Prigozhin personally served Putin on more than one occasion, which earned him the playful sobriquet of “Putin’s Chef.”

Putin, the former KGB agent who later remade Russia into his own fiefdom while dismantling the nation’s fledgling democracy of all but its most superficial forms, could be said to be as much of a thug as Prigozhin on many levels, even if a more polished and articulate one. Both St. Petersburg natives who made good, Putin went to university and Prigozhin went to prison. You can at once envision Prigozhin with bloody knuckles and Putin filing a nail while ordering a rival tossed out a window. The end result is the same. The two men most likely first encountered one another when the ex-con was in his casino business phase and Putin—who had held a number of significant political positions in the city—was serving as chairman of the supervisory board for casino gambling. Over time, they grew to be close associates, and even friends of a sort, with Prigozhin growing fabulously wealthy off government contracts awarded to his catering business. As Putin evolved from president to autocrat, he came to govern Russia much like an organized crime family, with his oligarchs—whose fortunes depended upon his favor—acting as loyal capos. Corruption clung to every corridor of Russian government and society. It suited Prigozhin well: he became a jet-setter who owned his own jets, and he moved into a compound that sported both a basketball court and a helicopter pad. And he diversified: some of his riches were pumped into Prigozhin’s so-called “Internet Research Agency,” a Russian troll factory later infamous for US election interference as it promoted Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton’s candidacy through a web of social media bots.

But it was as head of the Wagner Group that Prigozhin cemented his stature as a key oligarch closely aligned with Putin. A private military group that offered Russia plausible deniability in covert actions abroad, Wagner operated ruthlessly in geographies as remote from the Kremlin as Africa and the Middle East. Many found it impossible to unsee the widely circulated 2017 video of Wagner mercenaries first torturing and then using a sledgehammer to beat to death a deserter from the Syrian army. The sledgehammer became an unofficial Wagner emblem. But long before Syria, Wagner filled the ranks of the so-called “little green men” of professional soldiers with no insignia who appeared suddenly in 2014 in Crimea and in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, euphemistically identified by Moscow as organic separatists eager to secede and join the Russian Federation.

Putin’s brand of neofascist irredentism drew heavily on Hitler’s playbook. The Austrian Anschluss was almost effortlessly replayed in Crimea. And the Donbas would be the new Sudetenland. Meanwhile, Prigozhin and his Wagner Group would be the poorly disguised blunt instruments on the ground—as well as on plenty of other grounds, where shadow wars were conducted on distant continents and Russian power could be unofficially and mercilessly enforced. But absorbing eastern Ukraine proved a stubborn objective. And the West responded with economic sanctions rather than appeasement. Perhaps Poland 1939 would make for a better model?

On February 24, 2022, tanks rolled in, an act of unprovoked aggression not seen in Europe since World War II. But Russian ambitions turned out to be overoptimistic, to say the least. Putin expected to occupy Kyiv in a matter of days, but that was not to be. Ukraine held out. Joe Biden was president, not Donald Trump; Europe and NATO stood firm. But this spawned new opportunities for Prigozhin: he could rip off the mask, take Wagner out of the closet, and operate freely in Ukraine with his mercenaries as well as convicts recruited from Russia’s penal system. Yet, the war dragged on. Gains were few, Russian losses were magnified. Military effectiveness was handicapped by a culture of corruption not dissimilar to that which marked the rest of the state. Frustration fueled Prigozhin’s conviction that the stalemate might be broken if he was in charge, if only things could be done his way. He developed a heightened sense of self-importance. He clashed with high echelons of the military machine as well as with rival Russian nationalists. He made a lot of enemies. Still, Putin gave his old friend a lot of leash—until the day that Prigozhin came to believe his own bullshit. Putin’s chef proved to be the recipe for his own undoing.

Putin’s Sledgehammer is a magnificent book, but its inherent complexity and the level of detail it contains hardly makes for an easy read. I had the advantage of coming to it after previously poring through volumes by Peter Conradi on Russia, Thomas De Waal on the Caucuses, Serhii Plokhy on Ukraine, and Timothy Snyder on geopolitics. A talented writer whose work is based upon impeccable research, Candace Rondeaux ranks among those esteemed authors, but her work is not for beginners. Maps and a timeline would have been helpful. There’s also a dizzying array of characters, organizations, acronyms, etc. that are hard to keep track off, especially for those unfamiliar with Russian names and places. She does include a somewhat comprehensive table of principal players, but because these are arranged by association rather than alphabetically it is less helpful than it should be. Still, these are quibbles. This book will likely not only come to be considered the definitive biography of Yevgeny Prigozhin, but will certainly be counted as an extremely valuable contribution to the historiography in ongoing studies of the contemporary Russian state.

I have previously reviewed these other related books that are recommended reading:

Review of: Who Lost Russia?: How the World Entered a New Cold War, by Peter Conradi 

Review of: The Caucasus: An Introduction, by Thomas De Waal

Review of: The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy

Review of: The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy

Review of: The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, by Timothy Snyder

Wednesday, June 17,1881, a train had to leave station A at 3 A.M. in order to reach station B at 11 P.M.; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7 P.M. Who is capable of loving longer, a man or a woman?

That is “Question 7,” excerpted from a little-known early short story by Anton Chekhov entitled “Questions Posed by a Mad Mathematician.” Of course, there can be no answer to such an absurd question.

At 8:15 AM on August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay’s bombardier Major Thomas Ferebee released a lever 31,000 feet over Hiroshima and forty-three seconds later some “60,000 or 80,000 or 140,000” people (no one really knows) died. At that same moment, eighty miles to the south  of Ground Zero, Arch Flanagan—who had miraculously survived a stretch as slave laborer on the infamous Burma Death Railway—was “pushing carriages of rock up long dark tunnels” in a coal mine under the Inland Sea.

Now in his fourth year as a Japanese POW, physically and psychologically broken, the skeletal creature that still endured fully expected death to take him soon. He could hardly know then that the atomic bomb that killed 60,000 or 80,000 or 140,000 people that morning would mean that he would be spared. Nor could he have imagined that about sixteen years later a son would be born to him who would go on to become an internationally acclaimed author and who would win the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, inspired by Arch’s brutal experience on the Burma railway. There is much that is unknowable in life, but it is almost certain that if not for the bomb nicknamed “Little Boy” that would mean death for 60,000 or 80,000 or 140,000 Japanese souls, Tasmanian novelist Richard Flanagan would never have been born. Were the lives of Arch Flanagan (or Richard Flanagan, for that matter) or the hundreds of thousands of other Japanese and European and American and Australian survivors of the war worth the sacrifice of the 60,000 or 80,000 or 140,000 human beings who perished at Hiroshima on that day? Of course, there can be no answer to such an absurd question.

But that paradox clearly haunted the author, and it informs every single page of his own Question 7 [2023], a mesmerizing literary tour de force that is styled as a memoir but is in every way so very much more than that. One reviewer branded it “genre-bending,” and while I am ever reluctant to borrow from others when composing my own reviews, I surely cannot improve upon that. But then, as someone who has read every novel penned by Richard Flanagan can attest, genre-bending is what defines his art, from my first encounter with him in Gould’s Book of Fish [2001]—which I described elsewhere as “a stunningly original and brilliant blend of satire, heartache, love, cruelty, comedy, and existential tragedy, tossed with a superb use of magical realism … think William Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and John Irving, all stirring the same pot with different shaped spoons”—to the more mainstream literary fiction of The Narrow Road to the Deep North [2013], a historical novel focused on extremes of brutality and endurance that turns out after all to be a love story that likewise manages to qualify as a magnificent achievement.

At this point, it’s only fair to issue a kind of spoiler alert, because it seems to me that it would be nearly impossible to do justice to Flanagan’s work here without giving much of the story away, which yet sounds a bit weird because this is mostly nonfiction that hardly suggests a cliffhanger at the end. I say “mostly nonfiction” because while this is essentially an autobiography, the author admits to a certain literary license here and there. And if I state that it is “essentially an autobiography” I must immediately contradict myself because in fact it steps far beyond memoir to history, literature, and nuclear physics, as well as speculative challenges to notions of both teleology and existentialism that somehow manages not to reinforce nihilism. And there we are back to genre-bending! By the way, Flanagan never once cites schools of philosophy, though his musings repeatedly compel the mind of the reader to go there. He also never refers to quantum mechanics, but as I turned the pages I could not help but think of quantum probabilities and the “many-worlds” theory that insists that anything that can occur actually does occur elsewhere in the multiverse but is hidden from us because by observing an event we manifest only our own reality and obscure all the others. In a different take on the familiar “butterfly effect,” I suppose, in at least one of those worlds there is and never has been a Richard Flanagan.

It would hardly be giving too much away to point out that Flanagan plucked the title for his book from that brain-bender in the Chekhov short story. That he would turn to a corner of literature so utterly obscure for this purpose only underscores the eclectic range of the author’s intellect. Nearly as unfamiliar to most is The World Set Free, a 1914 novel by polymath H. G. Wells that predicted the development of the atomic bomb as a weapon of war. As Flanagan tells it, this sci-fi flight of fancy was written in part during a period that saw Wells distracted by his infatuation with the decades-younger journalist Rebecca West. Hardly as successful as his prior bestsellers, The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds (if indeed more prescient!), The World Set Free was largely forgotten—except by atomic scientist Leó Szilárd, who, upon reading it in the early 1930s, became obsessed by the implications, which later sparked an epiphany that had him conceive the concept of a chain reaction that could lead to nuclear detonation! As it turned out, Szilárd became part of the group that was to persuade FDR to launch a race to develop the bomb before Hitler could do so, as well as a key figure in the Manhattan Project that was to result in the creation of “Little Boy” and the deaths of 60,000 or 80,000 or 140,000 men, women, and children in Hiroshima in August, 1945—but also spare the life of Arch Flanagan, and thus make possible the birth of Richard Flanagan some years later.

Talk about the butterfly effect!

Despite the spoilers, there is a good deal more to Question 7, and it will definitely make you think. Like Gould’s Book of Fish—which I reread immediately after I turned the final page—I will likely read this one again at some point. There really is so much to ponder in what is after all a rather short book, given its dramatic scope. I especially enjoyed his treatment of the steamy relationship that arose between Wells and West, literary license and all, which reminded me a bit of his tortured portrait of Charles Dickens in Flanagan’s Wanting [2008], another outstanding effort. He also revisits the genocide that led to the almost complete extermination of aborigines by white settlers in what was then the convict colony of Van Diemen’s Land, a topic that runs through many of his books, the climate change driven fires that have forever disfigured the Tasmania that he knew in his youth, and his own near-death experience in a drowning incident that would later beget the substance of his superlative first novel, Death of a River Guide [1994].

Much as in Cormac McCarthy’s fiction, the universal themes that characterize Flanagan’s work frequently identify the prevalence of cruelty and evil in the world while ever holding out the hope—no matter how tiny—that love and compassion could ultimately prevail. In Question 7, there’s the compelling account of the all too real life encounters between the author and certain elderly Japanese men who had, many years before, once been the very sadistic camp guards who had cruelly victimized Arch Flanagan. They now seemed like such nice, older gentlemen. At the site of the mine where Arch once wasted away, local guides denied that slave labor ever existed, a potent reminder that history can not only be forgotten but intentionally scrubbed—a process sadly in progress across the United States today.

Arch Flanagan never fully recovered from his trauma as a prisoner of war, but he managed to live on to the ripe old age of ninety-eight, to hear his son relate back to him the stories of visits with other old men who had once viciously abused him. He passed away on the same day his now famous son confided that the final draft of The Narrow Road to the Deep North was complete. What does any of this actually mean? Of course, there can be no answer to such absurd questions—but we must nevertheless keep asking. At least, that’s my takeaway after closing the cover of Question 7.

I struggled to locate the text of “Questions Posed by a Mad Mathematician” [1882] on the web, and finally resorted to buying the collection, The Undiscovered Chekhov: Forty-Three New Stories [1998], in order to read it. At less than two pages long, the story proved anticlimactic. But I did get to read all the other questions. The final one, “Question 8,” is my favorite: “My mother-in-law is 75, and my wife 42. What time is it?”

 

I reviewed other Richard Flanagan novels here:

Review of: The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Richard Flanagan

Review of: Wanting, by Richard Flanagan

Review of: Death of a River Guide, by Richard Flanagan

Review of: First Person: A Novel, by Richard Flanagan

Review of: The Sound of One Hand Clapping, by Richard Flanagan

 

 

 

It has been said the United States is a nation of immigrants that despises immigrants. At first glance that seems counterintuitive and smacks of hyperbole, but simmering beneath the satire lies more than a single kernel of truth. Benjamin Franklin worried that German immigrants might alter the character of the Republic for the worse. In 1798, just a decade after the Constitution was ratified, the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed. A massive influx of the Irish fleeing starvation during the potato famine fueled a nativist panic in the 1850s that brought the Know Nothing Party to national prominence. The heinous Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882. Twenty years later, Woodrow Wilson complained of the coming of “multitudes of men of the lowest class from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland … as if the countries of the south of Europe were disburdening themselves of the more sordid and hapless elements of their population.” Such sentiments were codified into law with the Immigration Act of 1924 that set strict national quotas not abolished until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Sixty years later, the news is dominated by ICE roundups across the country and detainment centers like Alligator Alcatraz, with the president even citing a statute from the Alien and Sedition Acts to justify his widescale crackdown on the undocumented.

I was long familiar with this history, but what was entirely new to me was that just a few years after Wilson was bemoaning the “meaner sorts” from certain parts of Europe flooding American shores to the east, on the west coast there was a full scale race riot in Bellingham, Washington, about ninety miles north of Seattle, that saw mobs violently physically assault and eventually expel hundreds of immigrants from India who had been working at lumber mills in the vicinity. Nor was I cognizant of the fact—although perhaps I should have guessed—that in this Jim Crow era citizenship was largely out of reach for South Asian emigres because white supremacy jealously guarded that privilege. I was also surprised to learn that the same University of California Berkeley that was the hotbed for student antiwar sentiment in the 1960s was in the early 1900s home to an increasingly radicalized community of Indian expatriates who, while struggling against discrimination in the US, became laser-focused upon overthrowing British rule back home on the subcontinent, spawning the revolutionary Ghadar Movement. And I was completely unaware that the machinations of Ghadar operatives came to jeopardize the neutrality enforced by now-President Wilson as World War I raged in Europe, while Germans and Brits competed to alternately court or persecute these insurgents abroad. Finally, I had no clue that the activities of these Indians became one of the key ingredients that drove passage of the lesser-known Immigration Act of 1917 that established an “Asiatic Barred Zone,” and banned so-called “undesirables” from entering the country.

That’s a lot to unpack, but Scott Miller proves more than up to the task in his latest work, Let My Country Awake: Indian Revolutionaries in America and the Fight to Overthrow the British Raj [scheduled for publication in October2025], a well-researched, highly readable, and fast-moving account that manages—in less than three hundred pages—to brilliantly capture a long neglected if pivotal series of events that touched three continents with some consequence. Moreover, Miller’s critical eye for detail and talented prose masterfully reaches back more than a century to breathe life into colorful characters who walk the earth no longer. These include Indian activists Lala Har Dayal and Taraknath Das, the villainous Canadian immigration agent William Hopkinson, noted anarchist Emma Goldman, pioneering female jurist Annette Adams, assistant attorney general Charles Warren, and a whole host of British and German diplomats and spies. Likewise, episodes long forgotten or at least neglected elsewhere are skillfully slotted back into the historical narrative to fill in some highly significant blanks that speak to the recurring fever of rising nativism in North America, as well as a pre-Gandhi Indian nationalism that was fierce and transoceanic.

The prevailing wisdom has long been that British imperialism represented a kinder and gentler subjugation for its inhabitants than they might have suffered had they been conquered by the Belgians, French or Germans. Perhaps. But also perhaps not. Tasmanian novelist Richard Flanagan would remind you that British colonists directed the genocide that resulted in the near extermination of aborigines in what was then Van Dieman’s Land. British soldiers used machine guns to mow down thousands of Ndebele warriors in southern Africa in the 1890s. Nonwhite combatants clearly were not treated with the kind of “civilized restraint” that would have been afforded fellow Europeans during and after hostilities.

This was also true in India, occupied by England since the eighteenth century. In the process of putting down the Sepoy (AKA Indian) Rebellion of 1857, the British killed more than 800,000 Indians! Miller notes that a popular method of executing Indian rebels was a technique termed “blowing from a gun” that had the condemned strapped to the mouth of a cannon, which when fired created a grisly public spectacle as the body was blown to bits. In 1858, India was placed under direct crown rule, known as the British Raj, which endured until independence came in 1947. But these atrocities were never forgotten by the Indian people, nor its activists, at home or abroad.

Because we were allied with England back then, and remain favorably disposed to the UK today, it is easy to forget that despite our antipathy towards the wanton aggression and brutal conduct of Germany in World War I, taking sides was not such a clear cut process for the subjects of British colonial rule. Sir Roger Casement, a British diplomat famous for helping to expose the inhumanity that reigned over King Leopold’s Belgian Congo, was also an Irish nationalist who was stripped of his knighthood and then hanged for treason during the war. As we learn more about the routine oppression of Indians under the thumb of the Raj, it is not at all surprising that Ghadar conspirators would welcome collaboration with German agents in the US to help achieve their ends, while the British naturally would do everything they could to derail such efforts.

It is the unlikely confluence of people and events in the United States, Canada, Europe, and the Indian subcontinent as global war is breaking out that makes Let My Country Awake such a fascinating tale—especially since much of what Miller covers here is hardly familiar ground. Apparently, it was once just as obscure to the author himself: it turns out that a random headline reporting the Bellingham race riot unexpectedly spotted at a museum display planted the seeds for what evolved into this book. As such, I do attach some comfort to the fact that I am not the only student of American history wondering at my own ignorance in this regard. On the other hand, just like the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, incidents such as these had a way of being overlooked in the textbooks assigned to me back in the day.

Miller, a former international correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and other outlets,  knows how to take a good story and run with it, as he did in The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century [2011], which also established his reputation chronicling history that meets the standards of academia while appealing to a much broader audience. In his latest effort, as a critic I struggled to find fault, but I could detect few flaws other than in the book’s title—plucked from a poem by Rabindranath Tagore—which while relevant strikes me as a somewhat dull designation for such a vibrant, exciting work! Spoiler alert: Ghadar does not succeed in toppling the Raj, but along the way the author treats us to plenty of action and intrigue marked by espionage, plots and counterplots, cloakroom diplomacy, courtroom drama, and assassinations.

The unstated irony in Let My Country Awake is that few residents of the United States—which had fought two wars for independence against Britain—found sympathy in the plight of the Indians chafing under the weight of British colonialism. Nor were they welcomed as refugees. Instead, as people of color with an alien culture and religion, they were mostly shunned and detested—or violently driven off as at Bellingham in 1907. In the course of the narrative, Miller relates the unsettling tale of Bhagat Singh Thind, a US Army veteran who skirted customary prohibitions against naturalization by arguing that as a Sikh high-caste Indian he was effectively white. Thind attempted to coopt white supremacy and at first he succeeded. Citizenship was granted, but then stripped away in a subsequent Supreme Court ruling that Thind was not really white and non-white immigrants were ineligible to be American citizens, which also resulted in retroactively revoking the naturalization of more than seventy other Indians.

There was a time when I believed that we were moving away from all that as a nation—Thind actually had his citizenship restored in 1935—but I no longer hold that view. Still, whether you choose to hang on to optimism or pessimism when it comes to such things, whether your glass is half-full or half-empty or simply shattered, the historical record matters. The more you know about the past, the better you can perceive the present, and the more it can inform your vision of what lies ahead, however you conceive it. To that end then, this is an important book that I would urge you to read, as simply a chapter of our past, or perhaps as a parable for our future.

NOTE: This review is based upon an uncorrected proof of this book issued prior to publication.

I reviewed a previous book by Scott Miller here: Review of the President and the Assassin, by Scott Miller

I have reviewed several novels by Richard Flanagan, including this one: Death of A River Guide, by Richard Flanagan

For more about Roger Casement, I recommend this book by Adam Hochschild, reviewed here: King Leopold’s Ghost, by Adam Hochschild

Some years ago, I published a journal article about the Know Nothings, which can be accessed here: Strange Bedfellows, by Stan Prager

 

 

 

 

Imagine a vast, deep, dense, forbidding swamp of tea-colored water and mud and patches of dry ground, blisteringly hot, thick with populations of alligators and panthers and poisonous snakes and legions of biting insects and all manner of various other perils. Now imagine you are an enslaved person, compelled to long hours of punishing labor, routinely beaten, likely scarred, maybe branded, perhaps raped, subject to helplessly watch your loved ones sold away from you forever, with no hope for any future except more of the same. Then imagine that swamp as your salvation. You don’t have to imagine any of it because at one time it was all very real.

It was the Great Dismal Swamp, a geography shared by Virginia and North Carolina that was in the antebellum about two thousand square miles—roughly the size of Delaware!—which indeed proved the salvation for thousands upon thousands of the enslaved, across many generations, because it represented freedom, a certain haven out of reach of the white slavecatchers armed with rifles and vicious bloodhounds who were in terror of entering the swamp and ever again emerging alive. Rather than an underground railroad to distant places where slavery did not exist, this was instead a kind of tunnel into a fantastical alien territory where slavery could not exist. The enslaved men, women, and children who chose this course or were driven to it were called maroons, and if they survived they would be forever free.

All but forgotten, echoes of their seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century stories, long lost to history, are gradually being recovered with twenty-first century methods, through archaeological excavations, scientific analysis, and historical scholarship. Much remains unknown, yet unexplored, but a fascinating chronicle of what we have learned or can at least surmise can be found between the covers of Dismal Freedom: A History of the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp [2022], by J. Brent Morris, an extremely well-written study of a place and its peoples most Americans probably never knew existed.

I had a peripheral awareness of marronage—the self-emancipation of the enslaved who fled to live in the wilds—elsewhere in the hemisphere, but no idea that the process was so prevalent in the American south, nor that the numbers were so large. Exact figures are impossible to ascertain, but it seems that many thousands of fugitives and their descendants lived in the Great Dismal Swamp. Some estimates run as high as fifty thousand! That kind of scale demands far more attention than traditional studies have granted, which is what makes this fine work by Morris so valuable to students of the antebellum.

But I might never have come to it at all had I not first attended a presentation by David Silkenat entitled “Slavery and the Environment in the American South” at the Civil War Institute (CWI) 2023 Summer Conference at Gettysburg College—a lecture I nearly skipped because I thought it might be dull.  I could not have been more wrong: Silkenat’s skills at the podium are equal to his talents as a historian, and I sat captivated by his exploration of how much better adapted the enslaved were to their respective environments than their brutal white masters could have conceived. This empowered them to supplement their often meager rations by hunting and foraging after hours—as well as flee to marronage if there were wild lands nearby. But the true epiphany for me was when he put focus on the intricate mechanisms of the societies that developed and endured in the wildest and most massive space to host maroon colonies in the south: the Great Dismal Swamp. When his talk concluded, I picked up a copy of his book—Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South—and started in on it right away.

Marronage only represents a small slice of Scars on the Land, but there’s a story in it that affected me deeply. Silkenat cites the memoir of the formerly enslaved Charles Ball, which relates the tragic tale of his encounter with a naked and filthy runaway named Paul who had fled a beating to a nearby swamp. Paul’s escape was handicapped by a heavy iron collar around his neck that was fastened with bells to help discourage escape, which Ball attempted to remove, without success. When Ball returned a week later to try to assist him further, he found only the decaying corpse of Paul, who had hanged himself from a tree limb, crows pecking at his eyes. For Paul, clearly, not only was swamp life preferable to enslavement, but so too was suicide. This episode serves as another stark reminder that slavery in the south, long misremembered as a benign or even benevolent institution, was for many thus subjected marked instead by a horrific lifeway of oppressive labor routinely punctuated by cruelty so severe that a dark and dangerous swamp was a welcome refuge. And for some, like Paul, if that course failed, death yet remained a better alternative than living in chains.

In Dismal Freedom, Morris, professor of history at South Carolina’s Clemson University, succeeds brilliantly in recreating for the reader both the environment of the Great Dismal Swamp in the antebellum and the desperation that drove the enslaved to inhabit it, at any and all costs, as well as offering educated imaginings of the complex, vibrant communities that once thrived at its edges and in its depths. To this effort, he brings to a series of tight, well-crafted chapters a multidisciplinary toolkit that relies on the historical record, oral tradition, archaeological evidence, ecological studies, and much more to collectively summarize what is known of marronage in the Dismal over several centuries before it went extinct in the years that followed the Civil War and emancipation. Still, it’s not all data: Morris has a keen eye for interpretative analysis that resurrects for a modern audience the nuances of long-dead populations. But as a careful historian, he never fails to distinguish fact from speculation. And along the way, material that might otherwise be tedious is enlivened by the author’s talented pen and his obvious passion for the subject.

There’s a lot of history here, plenty of it unfamiliar. How many know of George Washington’s founding role in the Dismal Swamp Company (DSC), a fantasy turned to failure that dreamed of draining the swamp for agricultural purposes? Or that this attempt ultimately enlarged the maroon population, as some of the enslaved put to grueling labor in this effort fled to the dark recesses of the swamp? And who knew that Nat Turner’s father Abraham was rumored to be a maroon denizen of the Dismal, a footnote to that famous rebellion that was to weigh heavily long afterwards upon terrified whites who saw portents of insurrection in every corridor?

Morris also puts marronage in context as a phenomenon by no means limited to this geography—wherever slavery existed adjacent to wild places, those bold enough to dare would attempt to seek haven there. And not only enslaved blacks became maroons: Native Americans and even whites who lived outside the law would also call the Dismal Swamp home. For all, swamp life was both challenging and dangerous, but it offered not only freedom in the literal sense—especially for the enslaved—but a genuine independence from authority of all kinds, as well. For many thousands, the payoff was well worth the risk.

Morris identifies three different types of maroons who peopled the Dismal. The first were the “deep swamp maroons” who secretly dwelled far into the interior, fully secluded from the outside world. Some constructed cabins on stilts amongst the reeds. But many more put down stakes in the hundreds of the Dismal’s habitable islands, large and small, of drier ground—called mesic islands—that hosted individuals, families, and larger settlements. It is believed that trade networks were established between villages, and, ever wary of outsiders, that generations of maroons thrived there in isolation. And it turns out that the at-first forbidding tea-colored water of the Dismal is actually pure and safe to drink; stained an amber color by tannic acids from decomposing bark, the tannins inhibit the growth of bacteria and act as a preservative, so maroons could always count on a reliable source of potable water in what was an otherwise hostile milieu.

Then there were the “fringe maroons” who existed at the edges of the swamp. Because of their proximity to plantations, their liberty was more precarious, but that was offset by their ability to clandestinely trade goods and resources with those who remained enslaved, especially family members. Some even produced products, like shingles, which were valuable beyond the boundaries of the swamp. There were also runaways who sought temporary refuge at the swamp’s margins as fringe maroons, who then—unlike the hapless Paul—might after a “time out” return to surrender to slavery and take their punishment. Some resorted to this practice more than once.

Later, notably after the completion of another of Washington’s early visions, the Dismal Swamp Canal—which ran twenty-two miles to connect the landlocked sounds of Virginia and North Carolina—corporate ventures brought lumber and shingle industries to the region, and a third type of maroon emerged. Known as “liminal maroons,” these wily sorts would habitually step in and out of marronage, maintaining their freedom but making a living off the white man’s world. Like their fringe maroon brethren, once familiar with the Dismal’s ecosystem and how to survive there, formerly enslaved blacks could easily slip in and out at will, while their white captors could only proceed so far in pursuit, retreating in terror at dangers real and imagined that might lurk within the dark interior.

This is not to say such attempts were ever abandoned, only that these went largely unsuccessful—which further incensed slaveowners, for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, of course, was that maroons represented thousands of dollars in human “property” drained from their pockets, lost and unrecoverable. Second, viable maroon communities served as an open invitation to other potential escapees. But there was something else that infuriated them far more than any financial injury incurred: that numbers of the formerly enslaved could endure free and out of their clutches was an abomination they could not abide, yet they frequently found themselves powerless to redress. Their rage was fueled further by the paranoia of slave insurrection that dominated the southern plantation mentality; the slender thread that may have connected Nat Turner to the Dismal via his runaway father was imagined by many as a kind of sturdy chain linking their ostensibly docile chattel slaves with a restive savage mass hiding in the swamp, ever ready to rise up in concert and murder their white masters in their sleep. It never happened, of course, but it did not stop them from believing that the threat was real.

In between the books by Silkenat and Morris, I read The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community, by Matthew J. Clavin, a stirring account of a maroon colony that existed in a setting that was almost exactly the opposite of the hidden sanctuaries of the deep swamp maroons of the Dismal. This was what became known as the “Negro Fort,” a refuge for fugitive slaves recruited into service by the British in what was then the Spanish colony of East Florida during the War of 1812, who opted to remain behind after hostilities concluded in a military fortification heavily stocked with cannon and munitions that even had the audacity to continue to fly the Union Jack after the Brits decamped. This outraged General Andrew Jackson, who plotted to ultimately annihilate the fort, an act quietly countenanced by the American government. At the end of the day, the very existence of maroon communities represented a kind of thumbing their noses at white supremacy, something that simply could not be tolerated.

Fortunately, great numbers of maroons met happier outcomes in the Great Dismal Swamp, and while turning the pages of Dismal Freedom, the reader cannot help but cheer for all those who remained out of reach of those who would return them to cruel captivity. It’s also worth cheering for Morris, who has in one slender volume turned out a magnificent addition to the historiography that is also that rare work both suitable to a scholarly audience and accessible to the non-academic. As Morris well underscores here, recent studies have only barely scraped the surface of all that remains unknown about maroon communities, in the Dismal as well as elsewhere. But if you are as intrigued by this nearly forgotten history as I am, you’ll be in for a real treat when you dive into Dismal Freedom.

NOTE: I reviewed Silkenat’s book  here:  Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South, by David Silkenat

 NOTE: I reviewed  Clavin’s book here: The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community, by Matthew J. Clavin

 

Every serious student of the American Civil War knows that its central cause was human chattel slavery. Southern slave economies, deeply destructive to their own natural environments, lusted after new lands for transplanting their “peculiar institution,” especially the vast western territories of the Mexican Cession and the Gadsden Purchase, spoils of war and treaty. When Lincoln’s election on a “Free Soil” platform foreclosed that prospect, the plantation elite led the charge to secession, pledging to establish a “proud slave Republic.” Thus, most histories of the antebellum tensions that would lead to separation begin in the aftermath of the Mexican War (1846-48). But after Fort Sumter, references to Mexico are reduced to occasional footnotes on the periphery of the struggle for Union.

Meanwhile, the Republic of Mexico—which had been stripped of more than fifty percent of its territory by its rapacious northern neighbor—was plunged into economic and political chaos so severe that less than fifteen years after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the war, it fell victim to foreign invaders who would impose the “Second Mexican Empire” upon it. So it was that north of the Rio Grande, as hundreds of thousands garbed in blue or gray lost their lives to muskets or measles, and with Washington far too preoccupied to enforce the Monroe Doctrine, French imperialists sent an Austrian emperor to rule over all of Mexico. How it happened and what was to follow makes for a fascinating story via the talented pen of Raymond Jonas in his brilliant addition to the historiography, Habsburgs on the Rio Grande: The Rise and Fall of the Second Mexican Empire [2024].

In my decades of Civil War studies, only rarely have I paused to consider the conflict’s significance abroad, other than an awareness of the looming threat of European recognition of the Confederacy—Lincoln’s greatest fear. There was, of course, always a certain incongruity to the favor shown by Britain and France—who had each abolished slavery—to the breakaway CSA that championed human bondage. A large part of it was economic, of course, given the hunger for southern cotton. But another was driven by a real anxiety of what a United States that had nearly doubled its size with the spoils of Mexican soil could mean for a future balance of power in the Americas and elsewhere. As such, a house divided reassured them.

The first longer look I took was courtesy of Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton [2014], which demonstrated the global impact of British demand for cotton, endangered overnight by a now tenuous supply chain from the American south, its most important vendor. The result was especially ruinous for India, where colonial exploitation through wide scale cotton cultivation condemned its population to poverty and famine. A decade later, in American Civil Wars [2024], Alan Taylor widened the lens, revealing how growing concerns for an emboldened United States—with its Union restored—sparked new fears overseas of an emerging American Empire, and much closer to home: fueling Canadian nationalism in a race to create a union of their own before its constituent parts could fall prey to what looked to be an unquenchable thirst for territorial expansion by its aggressive neighbor. And further south, a weakened, essentially bankrupt Mexico offered Europe an opportunity to check American power and gain another foothold on the continent.

It was Taylor’s book that inspired me to read Habsburgs on the Rio Grande, and I was not disappointed. Jonas, professor of history at the University of Washington, starts off by sketching out the pitiful status of the Second Republic following the Texas Revolution, the Mexican Cession, and the Gadsden Purchase. A rump state of sorts, although its remaining territory was still sizeable, the war and its aftermath left deep socio-economic scars that set it politically adrift with an uncertain future further burdened by crippling debt. Mexico was not only maimed; it was deeply disfigured.

Years ago, I recall reading a remark by a supercilious pundit who wondered aloud what the west might look like today absent the forces of manifest destiny. He pointed to the economic and political turmoil that marked contemporary Mexico, and imagined a similar negative outcome for what is now the western United States. Of course—much like passing judgment on twenty-first century sub-Saharan Africa without taking into account the devastating impact of European colonialism—conditions in modern Mexico are in a large part the legacy of American imperialism. Moreover, we can only guess at what the Mexican federation would be like in 2025 if its borders still contained Texas, California, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and those parts of Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming that had been stripped from it by the war and other means. This point, minimized or even overlooked elsewhere, cannot be stressed too much.

Fallout from the Mexican-American War only exacerbated ongoing political instability. Within a few years, a coup put autocrat Santa Anna back at the helm, but he was then overthrown in Benito Juárez’s liberal revolution that saw widespread reforms to modernize the economy as well as separate church from state, which threatened both the power of large landowners and the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church. This led to a conservative revolt and civil war. Meanwhile, the handful of European powers that held the notes attached to Mexico’s crushing indebtedness—distrustful of one another but yet aligned for mutual benefit—sensed an opening to collect what was due as well as well as set up shop in America’s backyard while Lincoln was too busy eying the movements of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia to do anything about it.

This opportunity was handed to them on a silver platter when conservatives—defeated on the battlefield—reached out to France’s Napoleon III to request a monarch to rule over Mexico. What started out as an alliance of European nations given to intervention quickly fell apart over squabbling and a lack of will, but France stayed in the game. The French Army, at first stymied at the Battle of Puebla—a victory for Mexico still celebrated on “Cinco de Mayo”—later overwhelmed the forces of the Republic, sent Juárez’s government into internal exile, and placed the Austrian Habsburg Archduke Maximilian I on the throne as emperor of the newly established Second Mexican Empire.

This turns out to be an exciting tale Jonas recounts in a well-written narrative matched with an engaging style equally suitable to a popular or scholarly audience that serves as a welcome remedy to the all-too-common plague of book-length history presented as either dull or dumbed down. He’s at his very best with his detailed portrait of the hapless Maximilian: naive, idealistic, uncertain, self-absorbed, vacillating, easily influenced, and politically inept—in short, utterly unqualified to rule anywhere, but especially unsuitable for the chaotic powder keg that was 1860s Mexico. Furthermore, the Maximilian who emerges in these pages does not appear to have had a solid grip on the dangerous realities he was to encounter. Biographers have observed that Thomas Jefferson was capable of holding two opposing ideas in his head at the same time. The same perhaps could have been said of Maximilian, although unlike the shrewd Jefferson, he seemed entirely unaware of the contradictions.

For those intrigued by the intersecting lives of key figures in history, Maximilian’s family tree is worthy of attention. He was the younger brother of Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph I, ruler of Austro-Hungary until his death during the First World War. And he was married to the beautiful if mentally unstable Carlota, who was sister to none other than Belgium’s King Leopold II, later infamous for the horrific atrocities inflicted upon the inhabitants of the Congo Free State, his own personal fiefdom. Maximilian’s liberal ideals were not welcome at the court of Franz Joseph, but his pedigree— Habsburgs had once ruled the Viceroyalty of New Spain—lent him a legitimacy that suited both Mexican conservatives and European imperialists, each who pressed him to take on the dubious honor of becoming Emperor of Mexico. True to his characteristic indecisiveness, and ever vulnerable to persuasion, he at first declined but later accepted the role.

His reign was doomed from the start, not least because the new emperor never really understood his mission. Despite decades of political unrest and the schemes of conservative monarchists, Mexicans were mostly united in jealously guarding the hard-fought independence  won from Spain in 1821. Yet, Maximilian—a foreign ruler imposed by the French—expected nothing less than a joyous welcome as liberator by an adoring population. There was also an immediate conflict with his conservative patrons in Mexico, whose goal was to undue Juárez’s reforms by restoring the church and its large landholdings, and returning power to the wealthy elite. But Maximilian was a liberal who declared himself a champion of the indigenous and sought to further reform—the exact opposite brand of sovereign that reactionary collaborationists had hoped to import to do their will.

Spoiler alert: it did not end well. Maximilian and Carlota flailed about, playing at the frippery of royalty while deceived by their handlers—and their own imaginations—that they enjoyed a popular support conspicuous in its absence. Meanwhile to their north, the Union prevailed and shortly began to offer aid to the exiled Republic. Eventually France cut its losses and withdrew, but Maximilian—in a ludicrous underscore to his penchant for indulging his own illusions—remained behind, still confident that he was a welcome, beloved figure. That fantasy came to a predictable end in front of a firing squad, although it is likely the credulous Maximilian went to his death as dumbfounded as he had lived his life.

There’s far more to report about the events chronicled in this marvelous book, but no review could appropriately do that justice. All that I can add is that if you are interested in significant if relatively unfamiliar episodes of history that seldom receive their due, this volume deserves your attention as well as a permanent home on your bookshelves. You will not regret it.

 

My Review of:  Empire of Cotton: A Global History, by Sven Beckert

My Review of: American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850-1873, by Alan Taylor

“We are proud of and shall continue our far-reaching and sound advances in matters of basic human needs—expansion of social security—broadened coverage in unemployment insurance —improved housing—and better health protection for all our people. We are determined that our government remain warmly responsive to the urgent social and economic problems of our people … That men are created equal needs no affirmation, but they must have equality of opportunity and protection of their civil rights under the law …”

Can you guess which American political party once championed these ideals? The Democrats? [Cue loud game show buzzer!] Wrong! Those are in fact excerpts from the Republican Party platform that saw Dwight David Eisenhower coast to reelection in 1956, the year before this Sputnik baby was born. Moreover, such was the prevailing consensus of the day that those identical planks could seamlessly have been dropped verbatim into the platform of Ike’s Democratic opponent, Adlai Stevenson. But that was then and this is now: today’s MAGA Republicans would denounce it all with a pejorative flair as Marxist, socialist, woke. How did we get here? In Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus [2001], published more than two decades ago, acclaimed historian Rick Perlstein [Nixonland] identifies with an eerie prescience the origin of many of the ingredients that manifest today’s alt-right MAGA while looking back to locate the first fractures in a bipartisan accord that now strikes as almost unimaginable.

Once upon a time, a handsome square-jawed tanned figure with chiseled features stepped out of the panorama of Frederick Jackson Turner’s mythical western frontier—in this case Arizona—to demonstrate to America how it should be done. He could sometimes be seen on horseback, sporting a Stetson, gripping the stock of a rifle. Or more often—to recast the romance in a modern era—flying his own plane, a passion borne of his service as a pilot in World War II. Part of his legend was that he had pulled himself up by his own cowboy bootstraps, but that was hardly accurate; in truth, he inherited and once managed his family-owned department store. He later entered Republican politics and eventually went to the Senate as an anti-New Deal crusader.

At one time identified as the nation’s leading conservative, he clung to a complicated, deeply nuanced ideology that blurred the lines between states’ rights, libertarianism, federalism, and social justice. A lifetime member of the NAACP, he denounced racism, desegregated his own business, and acted as prominent advocate for integration in professional, educational, and civic circles, yet became nationally identified as a fierce opponent of civil rights because he objected to federal enforcement. That, as well as his hawkish anti-communism and uncompromising fiscal conservatism placed him on the extreme right of the political spectrum. Yet, despite his distance from the mainstream he became the Republican nominee for president in 1964. A warm personality offstage that frequently wore the face of a curmudgeon in public life, he polarized twin audiences that viewed him alternately as a genuine American patriot or a dangerous demagogue. And he happily played to those strengths and weaknesses in his acceptance speech at the convention, proclaiming—against the counsel of virtually every advisor—that  “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And … moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”—words that went on to launch the campaign that led to a landslide loss for Barry Goldwater.

But Goldwater is not actually the star of Before the Storm. That role goes to Clif White, the otherwise anonymous character who was the genius in grassroots organization that brought conservatives both out of the woodwork and out of the wilderness, eventually driving the three year effort behind the Draft Goldwater Committee that won his man the nomination, only to be overlooked and cast out of the inner circle once the campaign was underway. And here it is that Perlstein truly shines, articulately revealing the behind-the-scenes slow dance that quietly yet oh-so-elegantly drew unlikely, even dissimilar, partners from various corners to the main floor, where steps, at first disjointed, were neatly choreographed to move in unison. The result was a  spectacular production unlike anything ever seen before in American politics. When the credits ran, Clif White’s name was conspicuously absent, but it was indeed his show.

It would be a disservice to the reader to overlook the fact that some parts of the tale Perlstein tells of this back-of-the-room maneuvering runs to tedium. I recall the minutiae contained in one particular chapter of small print that became almost too much for me: more than once, I closed the cover to mindlessly scroll my phone. But this is a rarity in what is after all a very thick volume, and Perlstein writes so well that I read hundreds of other pages with rapt attention. And it was much later that I grudgingly acknowledged that despite the temptation I was grateful that I actually read rather than skimmed that very chapter; as with the plot of a fine, intricately crafted novel, it turns out that everything Perlstein shares is critical info eminently essential to the larger narrative.

How challenging the landscape was for Goldwater and how accomplished was Clif White in boosting his candidate to the lead is made abundantly clear by the early front-runner he replaced, liberal Republican and New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, his political opposite, although part of that was achieved with the unforced error that begat Rockefeller’s self-destruction when he divorced his wife to then wed a much younger woman, a misstep unforgivable in the eyes of the early 1960s electorate. Still, it was a long journey from Rockefeller’s politics to Goldwater’s, and White deserves extraordinary credit for coalition building out of the fragmented disaffected who comprised the edges of what truly became the conservative movement that flocked to Goldwater’s standard.

One significant element was a kind of rabid hyperbolic anticommunism that was the legacy of McCarthyism, but amplified by both the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, that manifested itself in a variety of conspiracy theories that tickled the tips of mainstream America’s very real paranoia in the grips of the existential threat of nuclear annihilation, while simultaneously fueling quite a number of lunatic fringes. What they all had in common was the unshakeable belief in the Machiavellian genius of Soviet leaders like Khruschev to clandestinely impose communism upon the United States so brilliantly and completely that the public would be unaware of the menace until it was already too late. (There are echoes of this in the 1956 sci-fi horror movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which has friends and family duplicated by pod people.) The most visible on the fringes was the John Birch Society, which held that US sovereignty was secretly being usurped and replaced by a shadowy world government installed by an international communist intrigue enabled by the Council on Foreign Relations. Their own fellow traveler was Major General Edwin Walker, who attempted to indoctrinate American active duty troops along these lines. A satirical fictional persona of this stripe takes the form of the clearly unhinged General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove, who also warned of the dire threat to our “precious bodily fluids” posed by fluoridated water—a stark reminder today that voices like those of now cabinet Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were once widely ridiculed by mass audiences.

This well pre-dated the presidency of John F. Kennedy—indeed conspiracy theorists insisted that not only key members of the Eisenhower Administration, but Ike himself, were covert communists. But JFK was to become the flashpoint as he became associated with the other burning issue igniting right-wing outrage: civil rights. A cautious moderate with finely honed political instincts, Kennedy had hoped to postpone taking a public stand on desegregation until after his re-election, which depended upon the support of the solid Democratic south, but he was dragged reluctantly into the moral crusade when he could no longer avert his eyes from the brutality southern cops inflicted upon peaceful protesters. His nationally televised call for the Civil Rights Act of 1963 was simply too much for segregationists and others on the right who already judged Kennedy soft on communism. Shoring up a now shaky base was part of what brought JFK to Dallas that November, where he was greeted by “Wanted for Treason” flyers created by an associate of General Walker. “We’re heading into nut country today,” he confided to Jackie on the last morning of his life.

In spite of Kennedy’s assassination, extremism remained an unwelcome fringe in American life. For his part, Goldwater mourned Kennedy, a good friend despite their policy differences, whom he’d looked forward to taking on in ‘64. And it was not like the Republican Party Clif White was retooling was openly welcoming the Birchers and die-hard segregationists into its ranks, but … but neither was it loudly denouncing them when they came calling either. More importantly, these angrier (if loonier) voices had tapped into a widespread twin populist discomfiture among an increasingly disenchanted portion of the electorate: perhaps, many wondered, Soviet communists were getting the better of us, after all; and, equally important, a deeply racist United States, south and north, was no more ready to embrace equal opportunity for black Americans in the 1960s than it had been in the 1860s. Then there were the old-school anti-New Deal conservatives, sent off to the back of the bleachers when a cleverly contrived rules change over seating delegates in the 1952 Republican National Convention marginalized their leader, Robert A. Taft, and brought Eisenhower the nomination and the White House. Finally, moderate Richard M. Nixon had lost the 1960 election only very narrowly; his disappointed supporters simply needed to be reminded of brand loyalty to keep them within the fold. Clif White had a keen eye for all these potential voters, and likewise recognized that many of them resided in states where the Republican Party had such little presence that it had never been in play as a political force. Then White went to work, assiduously cultivating a grassroots movement that neatly stitched all these elements together.

Of course, in the end it was all for naught, or at least it seemed at that moment. In a time when the threat of a nuclear Armageddon was a part of everyday kitchen table discourse, Goldwater’s own words at the convention and on the stump branded him as an extremist. “In Your Heart You Know He’s Right,” a rallying cry by Republicans, was wickedly mocked by opponents with the snarky riposte, “In Your Guts, You Know He’s Nuts.” Goldwater was hardly laughing when he was crushed at the polls. Prognosticators—prematurely of course—declared the Republican Party dead, at least as far as obtaining the presidency was concerned. After the long reign of FDR and Truman, perhaps the Eisenhower years were just an aberration. In any event, the lessons seemed clear: the fringe right managed to claw its way to the top and—predictably—went down in flames. The future for Republicans, if a future was even conceivable, was a return to the center. But while those fringes were roundly chastised by the button-down forces of reason seeking to reclaim the party, somehow—either by negligence or design—they were never effectively ostracized. Instead, neither welcomed nor exiled, they remained, lurking, quieter perhaps, but no less committed to their respective causes. They would, as we would find out, make alliance with others even more extreme and gravitate to the top once more.

Rick Perlstein is a progressive author and historian whose life’s work has been given to chronicling the rise of the right in modern American politics. Before the Storm is the first of a sequential chronology that to date includes Nixonland, The Invisible Bridge, and Reaganland. But I started in the middle and have been mostly reading Perlstein backwards. When I mentioned that as an aside in my review of Nixonland, the author sent me a sarcastic email offering to send me an essay he wrote in middle school!

Perlstein’s a funny guy, but there’s nothing humorous about the account that unfolds in his several books describing the way the tentacles on the outer fringes of the right gradually crept towards the center of the Republican Party and began strangling the creatures within that once represented a rather broad diversity of thought, stripping them of legitimacy until the only rightful heir remaining was attached to a rigidly ideological brand of conservatism. It did not happen right away, there were reverses and retreats, but each of these steps back yet left an indelible mark, and the bits of debris that collected from carving those marks coalesced into building blocks, and those in turn became structural forms that took on so much weight that they cracked the foundation of the party of Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt and, yes, Dwight Eisenhower, finally demolishing the central pillars that had defined the GOP for decades upon decades and supplanting it with a brand new edifice constructed upon tenets of self-righteousness that was increasingly intolerant of dissent, disdainful of compromise, and driven by the pursuit of power for power’s sake. All of that is clear now, in retrospect, with the strangulation complete, as the forces of the alt-right have entirely subsumed the Republican Party, now transmogrified into today’s grievance-driven, anti-democratic, MAGA cult of personality for Donald Trump.

Pundits yet still scratching their collective heads in an attempt to analyze how the GOP got here should first be admonished that, given its history, the dystopia of Trumpworld is perhaps not the aberration all too many assume—and then they should be referred to Before the Storm. Perlstein had already lived through Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich when that book went to print at the turn of the millennium, so although well aware of the trends he could not have known for certain what really lay ahead. But, man, he sure was on to something.

 

I’ve reviewed other Rick Perlstein books here:

Nixonland

The Invisible Bridge

Reaganland