Custerology The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer (Audible Audio Edition) Michael A Elliott William Dufris Audible Studios Books
Download As PDF : Custerology The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer (Audible Audio Edition) Michael A Elliott William Dufris Audible Studios Books
On a hot summer day in 1876, George Armstrong Custer led the Seventh Cavalry to the most famous defeat in U.S. military history. Outnumbered and exhausted, the Seventh Cavalry lost more than half of its 400 men, and every soldier under Custer's direct command was killed. It's easy to understand why this tremendous defeat shocked the American public at the time. But with Custerology, Michael A. Elliott tackles the far more complicated question of why the battle still haunts the American imagination today.
Weaving vivid historical accounts of Custer at Little Bighorn with contemporary commemorations that range from battle reenactments to the unfinished Crazy Horse memorial, Elliott reveals a Custer and a West whose legacies are still vigorously contested. He takes readers to each of the important places of Custer's life, from his Civil War home in Michigan to the site of his famous demise, and introduces us to Native American activists, Park Service rangers, and devoted history buffs along the way. Elliott shows how Custer and the Indian Wars continue to be both a powerful symbol of Americas bloody past and a crucial key to understanding the nations multicultural present.
Custerology The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer (Audible Audio Edition) Michael A Elliott William Dufris Audible Studios Books
This book attempts to tackle the Custer mythology on too many levels and winds up failing in each. The book considers Custer's historical activities, examines the lingering pop culture aspects and offers sociological analysis of the notorious man and the famous battle. The historicals are provided largely as context and background. For true Custer buffs, this is all review with little additional insight. For novices, these quick gloss-overs, while accurate, are insufficient. The pop culture piece could have been so much more! I was hoping for a quirky, detailed travelogue, in the fashion of Sundays with Vlad: From Pennsylvania to Transylvania, One Man's Quest to Live in the World of the Undead, introducing us to a wide cast of characters who are involved and invested in the many facets of the Custer myth. Instead, we get a few scenes with Native American activists, and two chapters on re-enactors. The 50-page blow-by-blow on the local battle re-enactments in Hardin was painful to read -- but on the positive side, now you dont have to go see the performances yourself! As for the academic analysis, it also lacks the depth and dedicated effort to be completely worthwhile. Had Elliott dedicated his focus on one of the three approaches, the book would have been a more rewarding read.Product details
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Custerology The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer (Audible Audio Edition) Michael A Elliott William Dufris Audible Studios Books Reviews
Last week I read The Last Stand, Nathaniel Philbrick's popular history on Custer and Sitting Bull. This week I dug out a book I've have for several years, Custerology, which looks at popular remembrances of Custer and the Last Stand.
Back in the day, I edited a newsletter for Civil War buffs in Nassau County. I got to know people who devoted significant financial and time resources to studying and reliving the Civil War. I saw the subculture of Civil War living historians ("re-enactors" to the uninitiated) and got to know folks similar to the non-academic historians who people Custerology. These are folks who throw themselves into their hobby and travel thousands of miles every year to participate in it. Part of what they love is that not all is known, or can be known, about Custer's final battle.
Interest and controversy swirled around Custer from the minute the first reports of his death hit the East. They continue to this day.
Author Michael Elliot says that the "historical commemoration of Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn has been a medium through which the United States expresses its collective ambivalence about its relationship with the indigenous people who have lived within its borders." Elliot says that while we sometimes think of the perceptions held by Americans today of Westward expansion as either being one of "glorious expansion" or "ruthless exploitation", in fact it is discussed with both appreciation and regret by the same people. While the emphasis may change over time, this has been true for decades.
Watch the Errol Flynn film on Custer, They Died With Their Boots On, made more than 70 years ago.
Adventure, high spirits, and a recognition of profound loss all wrapped up in a ball of racial superiority and nationalism in a country whose Civil War had ended just 11 years before the battle.
Custer led a relatively small force at the Little Bighorn. An even smaller part of that force, just over 200 men, were with him at the "last stand", so why was he built into a name that almost every American knows? Politics played a part.
He was a Democrat and a hero of both the Indian wars and the Civil War at a time when Democrats were associated with pro-Confederate treason. There were rumors that he would be the Democratic presidential nominee in 1876. When he was killed, the Democratic newspapers built him into an elegant superhero. President Grant, on the other hand, called the Little Bighorn "a sacrifice of troops, brought on by Custer himself, that was wholly unnecessary." Ever since then, says Elliot, "for every person ready to proclaim Custer a hero, there has been another ready to label him a fool."
But for Republicans and Democrats alike, Custer was a necessary factor in the manufacture of an American ideology. Custer's supporters understood his role in the mythic creation of the white Republic. Gen. Edward Godfrey, a Little Bighorn survivor and leader of the 7th Cavalry veterans, said in 1926 that the conquest of the Plains Indians was part of "the struggle of the white civilization for supremacy" in North America.
Custer's defeat made him a particularly important focus because commemoration of loss helps to bind a racial group together. Elliot writes
The memorialization of the Southern Confederacy and of the Texans' defeat at the Alamo has offered venues for the articulation of a white identity that claimed distinction from the larger United States, even as it considers itself to be a purer form of American Patriotism.
The Alamo and Confederacy, along with the Last Stand, "suggest something of the symbolic power of defeat" in forming white identity. The "militarily vanquished can acquire an aura of authority that victors lack... Custer's spectacular defeat has enabled an uncritical veneration by generations of whites, for it has relieved them of the guilt that accompanies the memories of the colonization of American Indians." This, Elliot write, derives "from a collective desire on the part of white Americans to see their historical conquest of North America as a defensive, rather than offensive, history-a reaction to the threat of nature's savagery compelled by the the unstoppable machine of progress instead of the result of calculated choices." The fact that the destruction of many Indian nations was planned by individual men for specific purposes of state or private interest could be covered up with the notion that Custer, and all whites, were merely agents of unstoppable forces of history.
General Phil Sheridan, the author of many of these policies, understood that the Indians were not simply part of a historical machine. He wrote of their violent resistance
We took away their country and their means of support, broke up their mode of living, their habits of life, introduced disease and decay among them, and it was for this, and against this they made war. Could anyone expect less?
The Custerologists, like the Civil War buffs, don't like issues of national morality and race relations intruding on the good fun of studying their subject. They give a brief acknowledgment of the factors behind the war, but then quickly move on to military maneuvers and the proper thread counts of cavalry uniforms. Elliot writes of them that "they embody an approach to history that values authentic, tangible details...to the near exclusion of the political contexts of both the past and the present. That exclusion has consequences for how one thinks, or does not think, about contemporary tribal peoples."
But certainly the Custerologist approach is not that of the general public. The public has been as interested in the Indian side as it has been in Custer. We all know Custer, but we also all know Sitting Bull.
After the battle, Sitting Bull went on tour with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, where he was a featured attraction. Sitting Bull also did a lecture tour in which he tried to explain the paths to good relations between whites and Indians. Unfortunately he spoke in his own language, and his translator, knowing what the public wanted, presented an account of the killing of Custer when Sitting Bull was in fact talking diplomacy. An Indian who was educated in the East heard one of these speeches in Philly. At the end, the translator invited the white audience to "meet the man who killed Custer." The Indian, Standing Little Bear, was amazed when the crowd joyfully lined up. He later wrote
It made me wonder what sort of people the whites were anyway. Perhaps they were glad to have Custer killed and really pleased to shake hands with the man who killed him.
One wonders what Standing Little Bear would have made of this clip from the Vietnam era film Little Big Man.
So far I have only read the 18 page introduction. Based on that I find the topic to be very original and the book looks promising. This is not a study of the battle of the LBH, but more a study of the people who study Custer, his times, and his last battle. I will complete this review when I finish the book, which I'm about to pick up again right now.
12/19/07
Having finished the book yesterday I'd like to follow up on my original brief comment. Certainly the book deserves 4 stars. I especially enjoyed learning more about the annual LBH reenactments (however, I do wish that he would have asked Joseph Medicine Crow what he thinks of the Real Bird reenactment). There's also lots of interesting people to meet and learn about within its pages. I didnt always agree with all of Mr. Elliott's conclusions, but at the very least there is lots to think about within this book. Definitely worth your time if your interest in Custer goes beyond troop movements at the Little Big Horn.
What most in America know about Custer is largely full of myths and legends. Elliot explores these myths, tries to understand why they were created and why they still exist in the minds of so many today. I loved this book - from moments of tears, laughter and enlightenment, this was definitely NOT a dry read. Be prepared to realize how little you actually knew of the cruelty of the US Government to Native Americans. I knew prejudices were bad, awful even... but I cried when reading about Sand Creek, realizing just how little I knew before.
It was an interesting premise - how the Custer debacle continues to bring debate, strange theories, different story angles and even the American mind-set despite the fact that almost 137-years have passed since the battle. A must read for Custer fans and detractors.
This book attempts to tackle the Custer mythology on too many levels and winds up failing in each. The book considers Custer's historical activities, examines the lingering pop culture aspects and offers sociological analysis of the notorious man and the famous battle. The historicals are provided largely as context and background. For true Custer buffs, this is all review with little additional insight. For novices, these quick gloss-overs, while accurate, are insufficient. The pop culture piece could have been so much more! I was hoping for a quirky, detailed travelogue, in the fashion of Sundays with Vlad From Pennsylvania to Transylvania, One Man's Quest to Live in the World of the Undead, introducing us to a wide cast of characters who are involved and invested in the many facets of the Custer myth. Instead, we get a few scenes with Native American activists, and two chapters on re-enactors. The 50-page blow-by-blow on the local battle re-enactments in Hardin was painful to read -- but on the positive side, now you dont have to go see the performances yourself! As for the academic analysis, it also lacks the depth and dedicated effort to be completely worthwhile. Had Elliott dedicated his focus on one of the three approaches, the book would have been a more rewarding read.
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