Reviews for Surrender at Appomattox

The average rating for Surrender at Appomattox based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-02-02 00:00:00 Christopher Campbell In Children's Voices of the Trail, Rosemary Gudmundson Palmer dedicates herself to the project of analyzing the production of letters, journals and diaries on the Platte River trail. Palmer defined diaries and letters as accounts written at the time or shortly after the events they describe, whereas letters and reminiscences were recorded later. She notes that even diaries and journals were recorded with the intention of sharing with an audience. "Trail diaries were often written for public use'to be published in newspapers, sent home for family and friends to read, kept as logs for future emigrants'or for private perusal." Interestingly, keeping diaries was especially important for Mormon families. Mormons kept diaries as records of their personal and family story; the records, as well as the abstract concept of the story, would be passed down to future generations as inheritance. Palmer has also engaged with the genre of biography, as she tried, where sources permitted, to understand the child's whole outlook on the journey by combining materials.Palmer's contribution through this book is mainly as a resource in understanding and using historical documents produced by children, applicable to fields outside this one, rather than an understanding of childhood in the west. Palmer was clearly interested in the journey of Mormons to the West, and her work would likely be much stronger if she had confined herself to this topic. Palmer argues that the Mormon journey needs to be considered not just in North America, but as a journey that began in Europe and crossed the Atlantic Ocean. This then is her rationale for including discussion of social trends in the Old World in her introduction. Her introduction is too broad in both its discussion of social trends in Europe and their influence on American society, even among recent immigrants and her understanding of the phase of childhood. Palmer grounds her discussion of Victorian childhood in its sentimentalization, as compared to 'Puritan times.' While Palmer probably does well to include her understanding of childhood as a historical concept, it seems to play little role in her analysis of the primary source material. Her introduction also discusses middle-class and upper-class Englishmen in comparison to Americans; her search for causes and influences is too broad. Even if the reader understands that Palmer wants to lay an understanding of Old World society and its influences on the immigrants who traveled west across America, why is she focusing so much on upper-class and middle-class people? One imagines that it was far more common for less privileged groups to emigrate and begin the pioneer trek in America. The second major problem with this introduction is that Palmer seems to want to make distinctions between socio-economic classes and their approaches to designing homes. This distinction never appears in her analysis of the frontier. Though this information may be accurate, its importance to the subject of her book is at most tangential. In her chapter "Friend or Foe," she distinguishes three ethnic groups for the specific reactions they provoked among the rest of the travelers: Mormons; "Missourians," poorer white people; and Native Americans. However, her analysis focuses on the reactions provoked by these others' presence in her source material, and not the experience of these minority groups except if they produced letters and diaries. One of Palmer's more interesting findings was that "these young writers tended not to judge racial intermarriage as adult writers did, although their general opinions implied that they still assessed Native Americans according to their own cultural standards." This discovery supports Palmer's argument that the voices and opinions deserve attention separately than that given to adults since children see and perceive their surroundings differently.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-05-08 00:00:00 Matthew Hopson Powers's history is about more than the death of one man. Many men and women were killed in the period of the Sioux wars of the 1860s and 70s. In using the death of the iconic warrior chief as a kind of hub, Powers relates the history of those years made up of dispute and open warfare which ended in the death of the old, traditional hunting and raiding life of the Plains Sioux. It's a history written with the aid of the rich resources left by participants of both sides but most interestingly from the point of view of the Indians because it's a portrayal of primitives told with an anthropological precision giving us a detailed picture of every aspect of Indian life, not only warfare but also ceremonial practices, social structure, dress, food, ways of thinking about and dealing with death, and marriage customs. It's as clear a picture of what the Plains peoples were like as I remember reading. We understand the motives of the white men and the westward movement. Powers addresses that but to his credit spends even more time explaining the intellectual disciplines of the Indians and their understanding of the several powers in the nature around them, how they related to and used them. And also to his credit, as a history of the spiritual impulses of the tribes as well as the political, which was a thick stew of shifting fortunes and allegiances, it's told not in the stereotypical way of Indian oral histories but in the modern language in which this history has come down to us. This is probably the best book I've read at describing that seam where the Indians and white men met. The story itself is full of self-serving motive and misunderstanding. Powers demonstrates the friction caused by the contact of 2 culturally diverse and technologically imbalanced societies. His story is analysis which brilliantly isn't analysis but is comprehensive in its glaringly hostile attitudes these 2 cultures in collision had of each other. Without actually saying so, he shows why they couldn't co-exist. The prime mover of Powers's story may be Crazy Horse but this is a larger history of the displacement of a people which is human, tragic, and utterly fascinating, and which the author follows well into the twentieth century.