Reviews for The History of the Jews, from the Earliest Period Down to Modern Times, Volume 2

The average rating for The History of the Jews, from the Earliest Period Down to Modern Times, Volume 2 based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-04-16 00:00:00 Zezinho Welter Two Classic Books on the Damming of the Missouri Are Rereleased Last year, while traveling down U.S. Highway 83 to research my next book, I spent a day at the Fort Berthold Reservation, N.D. At the Scout’s Post No. 1, where those who served with Lt. Col. Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn are interred, I met an Arikara man and Vietnam vet, Don Dickens. Retired from the tribal government, he spends his free time taking care of the lonely graveyard. The remains of veterans from several wars there were once buried in the bottomlands along the Missouri River, but they were relocated when the flood came. This inundation was not a spring runoff, but a manmade disaster created by two U.S. agencies, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation. Unlike most Native peoples, the Arikara, Mandan and Hidatsa had not been forced onto a reservation not of their choosing. They were sedentary peoples who had lived along the river for centuries. And then in the 1940s, Congress and the federal government, in response to devastating floods in downriver communities such as Omaha, pushed legislation through that created several projects to dam the Missouri and several of its tributaries. There’s little evidence that any of these bureaucrats and legislators gave a second thought to the Native American communities that resided along the bottomlands. None were consulted prior to the law being enacted. Despite the belated protests of the Three Affiliated tribes and other nations up and downstream, the projects continued. “It destroyed a way of life. Everybody farmed. Everybody had gardens and cattle. They ranched. They took it all away, and now they eat commodities. Everybody has developed diabetes and heart disease,” Dickens told me. Coincidentally, a few months after I visited the reservation, two important books chronicling this sad chapter of U.S. history were rereleased. Dammed Indians Revisited: The Continuing History of the Pick-Sloan Plan and the Missouri River Sioux by Michael L. Lawson (South Dakota Historical Press) and Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three Tribes and the Trial That Forged a Nation by Paul VanDevelder (Bison Books), are two important works that together give a compete picture of how the tribes received the raw end of a deal they never asked for. Both books take different approaches to the storytelling. Lawson is a historian and VanDevelder is a journalist. Dammed Indians Revisited deals primarily with the plight of the Lakotas who lived in the bottomlands along the Standing Rocking and Cheyenne River Reservations. Coyote Warrior is the story of the Three Affiliated Tribes. Of the two books, I relate to VanDevelder’s style the best. His story centers on the Cross family, who fought for justice for two generations. Martin Cross, a Hidatsa who married the daughter of Norwegian immigrants in the 1930s, was the first of his family to oppose the dam tooth and nail. Later, his son Raymond, an attorney specializing in federal Indian law, continued the fight to receive fair compensation for the tribes’ losses. This character driven approach to writing history makes the story come alive for the reader. The relatively “dry” historical facts are interspersed with the narrative of this fascinating and tenacious family. Dammed Indians Revisited is a more traditional history book, written by a trained historian. But what an incredible piece of work this is. It includes the best blow-by-blow account of how the Pick-Sloan plan came to be. (Raymond Cross figures in this work as well). Some regard this book as a “classic,” and I agree. Those who study the forcible removal of communities to make way for dams have been referring to it for years. First published in 1982, the new edition of this work is most welcome. It is almost a new book with several new chapters and detailed updates of events since 1980. New forewords from the author and former South Dakota Sen. George McGovern are included, along with the original written by Vine Deloria, Jr. Those who read the book in its first iteration, or libraries who have the first edition, will want to add this work to their collections. The same can’t be said for Coyote Warrior, which first came out in 2004. Except for a new afterword by the author, there isn’t much new here. However, these are not competing books, but complementary. They should be read together. And their near simultaneous rereleases should bring further attention to yet another sad chapter in the federal government’s callous mistreatment of Native peoples. Quoted in the new afterward in Coyote Warrior, Raymond Cross perhaps said it best: “This story is the retelling of the oldest story we have. It’s story that goes back to the Greeks and before. It’s the story of the struggle for justice, the struggle for dignity, and it’s the story about the indomitability of the human spirit.” Stew Magnuson is the author of the award-winning nonfiction book, The Death of Raymond Yellow Thunder: And Other True Stories from the Nebraska-Pine Ridge Border Towns. He can be reached at www.stewmagnuson.com.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-05-01 00:00:00 Joe Cool An academic and dense look at the injustice of the Missouri River Sioux tribes flooded out by dams.