Word: dawned
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History By Karl Jacoby Penguin, 384 pages...
...Gist: In the predawn hours of April 30, 1871, a group of attackers ambushed an encampment of Apaches in Aravaipa Canyon, outside the town of Tuscon. 144 people - overwhelmingly women and children - were slaughtered. This much we know at the outset of Shadows at Dawn, by Brown University historian Karl Jacoby. We also know who these attackers were, for the most part: an unlikely alliance of white settlers, Spanish-speaking landholders known as vecinos and members of an opposing tribe, the Tohono O'odham. But rather than tie these four groups' tales together into a standard history of what became...
...Lowdown Any reader knows he's in trouble when the author finds it necessary to earnestly overexplain the book's title. Shadows at Dawn, in this case, is meant to refer not only to the hour the massacre took place but to the "murky, often elusive nature of historical truth," while "Borderlands" refers both to the contested area separating the U.S. and Mexico and also to the demarcation between "history and storytelling...
...pleasant surprise, then, that much of the rest of Shadows at Dawn is a crisply readable history - four of them, in fact, with the Apache, the Anglos, the vecinos and the O'odham allotted two chapters each. Jacoby does a good job outlining the causes of the massacre from each point of view, whether historical, cultural or geographical. In some cases, maybe too good a job: the litany of abuses attributed to the Apache by their attackers as justification for the massacre reads less like a Southwestern Rashomon and more like Murder on the Orient Express - every hand...
...organizations like Heritage had been so successful. That would explain the fact that in January Podesta's organization plans to publish a 600-page manuscript called Change for America: A Progressive Blueprint For The 44th President that is consciously modeled on a very similar conservative document produced at the dawn of the Reagan era. That 1,000-page book written by the Heritage Foundation in 1981, Mandate For Leadership, became the blueprint for the incoming administration of Ronald Reagan. The book was placed on the seat of all the Reagan Cabinet officials at their first meeting, making about...