My latest piece, a trypitch of book reviews is available at http://www.firstofthemonth.org/weighty-tomes-bob-levin-reviews-monography-blood-on-the-water-the-dying-grass/

I’ve already blogged the first two, but the third begins…

General Oliver Otis Howard (1830 – 1909) was a devout Christian and ardent foe of slavery. After the Civil War, in which his service to the Union cost him an arm at the Battle of Seven Pines, he headed the Freedmen’s Bureau and founded and was the first president of Howard University.
But throughout the summer and fall of 1887, Howard led 1500-2000 well-supplied, heavily armed troops 1100 miles, across what-is-now Oregon into what-is-now Montana, in pursuit of 250 less well-equipped Nez Perce warriors, half of whom his soldiers killed, and 500 women and children, many of whom they also slew, in order to heard them onto a reservation designed to extinguish their way of life and culture.
Howard also warred, with the same end in mind, against the Apache, Bannock, Modoc, Paiute, and Seminole peoples, and, reading William T. Vollman’s knock-out novel “The Dying Grass” (Viking. 2015), I wondered when Native Americans would demand his university remove his name.