This book was difficult to review because I was enthralled with the subject, but the actual writing made an important issue dull and uninspired. The book reads like a dry paper. There is so much time spent on small unimportant details and so little time spent on the most important parts. For example, in the last few papers, the mass grave is discovered. I wanted to know more about the people on-site. Their feelings and thoughts. The process of the discovery. What the next steps in the process will be? What else can we learn from these discoveries? But I was left with only a few sentences.

The book is not about the Tulsa massacre per se. Nor is is about the discovery of the mass grave. Instead, it is about the process of discovery and disclosure of these events. I understand that, but it is inherently the least interesting part of the story and thus it needs to be very well written in order to express the compelling story that it attempts to represent.

An interesting addition to the literature on the subject, but not the first book to read on it.

I had never heard about the tragic incidents that happened in the 1921 Tulsa community until I saw The Watchmen on HBO. I pressed pause and immediately immersed myself in online research.

My heart already ached from the details I had uncovered by the time I was offered the chance to read this informative book. It has always been my opinion that knowledge is power and that learning the details of our past for discussion is imperative. How else will we learn and improve? We must forge better paths from examining these horrific mistakes.

It’s never easy to hear about terrible circumstances and pain inflicted on people with such malice . . . but we should be willing to face our history no matter how ugly and hopefully never doom ourselves to see unspeakable atrocities such as these repeated. I appreciate this author's attention to detail and willingness to shed light on this very sad event.

I'd like to thank NetGalley and Dutton for an advanced copy of The Ground Breaking for my unbiased evaluation.  4 stars

THE GROUND BREAKING by Scott Ellsworth is subtitled "An American City and Its Search for Justice" and is about the Tulsa Race Massacre and its aftermath. Ellsworth, an award-winning author and formerly a historian at the Smithsonian Institution, currently teaches at the University of Michigan. He begins this text by describing Greenwood, Tulsa's African American district in 1921, as "a wonder, a living and breathing Black edition of the American Dream. But ... it is also a mindset, a bearing, a way of engaging with the world. In an age when people of color are constantly being told that they are lesser beings, here is a community who knows that they are just as good as anyone." In his first chapter, Ellsworth details the events of late May and June 1, 1921 – the mob violence, use of incendiary bombs to set the district on fire, the looting and killing. He then turns to the efforts he made (over 50 years later in the late 1970s) to learn about those events, including interviews and scouring primary sources like police records and newspapers from the time and a written account by Greenwood resident Mary Parrish, "easily the single most important source on the history of the riot." Other sections of the text focus on efforts at rebuilding, searching for the graves of those who died, obtaining reparations, and getting wider attention. The Washington Post published the first national story (after 1921) in 1982 after Ellsworth's Death in a Promised Land was published and it was more than a dozen years after that - and after the Oklahoma City Bombing - until the state legislature agreed to fund a Commission to look into the riots in Tulsa. A harrowing and truly fascinating account, THE GROUND BREAKING contains copious notes and received starred reviews from Kirkus, Library Journal ("A must-read for all who are interested in how history continues to impact the present"), and Publishers Weekly.

I had previously read The Burning by Tim Madigan and watched several specials on the Tulsa Race Massacre for the 100th anniversary this year, but this is definitely a topic that has been so under discussed until recently that I feel like we can't get enough. This book goes into a lot of detail of what happened and what's happened since, as well as covering several more recent events as the Tulsa Race Massacre has become more well know. It was interesting to hear how much played out in real-time as Ellsworth was working on this project. I appreciate this book and other efforts documented in this book to help shed more light on the race massacre and how we can not only acknowledge this event but also finally try to reconcile, and I would definitely recommend this book.

This is a fascinating, well-written and profoundly sad story. Anyone who is paying attention now knows of the Tulsa Race Massacre that occurred in 1921 and was erased from most local memory and document trails for decades. The thriving Greenwood black section of Tulsa, with scores of businesses and professionals, was burned and bombed to the ground and (possibly) hundreds of black citizens were murdered by their white neighbors.

Not all historians write well, but Ellsworth does, and evokes the mood and the nuances of the times. But this isn't simply the story of the event itself -- he did that years earlier in another book. This story continues past then and talks about the aftermath, focusing strongly on the search for the mass graves. It's a compelling detective story. Given the almost total deliberate lack of written records, researchers searched out anecdotal and eyewitness accounts -- and the clock was ticking since most survivors had already died. It includes the political and social machinations in Tulsa and the long trail that led to new discoveries.

Highly recommended. Thanks to Net Galley and to the publisher for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I was really looking forward to this book, but the audiobook version just isn't doing it for me. The first two chapters explain the Tulsa Race Massacre and its immediate aftermath, and the rest of the book is about a political, social, and spiritual quest to find and uncover mass graves of the massacre's victims. I recommend it for history nerds, and readers interested in archival work and historical preservation.

Historian James Ellsworth brings us the story of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, which he describes in vivid detail. He tells the story of how thousands of people were killed. In this book, Ellsworth details the events leading up to the riots, including the discovery of mass graves believed to contain victims, and he debunks rumors that a Black teenager was the intended target of the violence. On May 30, 1921, Dick Rowland, a shoe shiner at a white-owned business, was heading to a designated “colored” restroom at the Drexel Building; minutes after he left, Sarah Page, the 17-year-old white elevator operator there, screamed. The reason was never determined, Dick was blamed, Sarah declined to press charges, and the matter seemed to be settled, but it wasn’t. The Groundbreaking is a true-life thriller, both of which combine to make this book feel like a true crime story. It’s also filled with fascinating anecdotes about how individuals helped and tried to stop Scott Ellsworth. Thank you, Dutton Books, for the gifted copy.

Breaking Ground is a unique history of the Tulsa Race Massacre in that it gives the reader a view very early on of what happened on that day in 1921. Then the book goes into the decades of investigation the author and others undertook to determine how the massacre got “buried” and the process of bringing the massacre into light. Most histories of events start at the beginning and lead up to an ending. Breaking Ground seems to give us the ending first and then show us the meticulous pain staking process that got us to that point of knowledge. It was very tv crime procedural.

Breaking Ground is a very timely book because most of the book is ultimately dedicated to the question of how does a community grapple with the uncomfortable elements of its past? This is a debate much of the country is currently grappling with. It’s very clear and concise and in its pages of investigative history, I think ultimately contains a call for us as a nation to investigate ourselves and our mistakes as a nation because the events of the past are a lot closer than many of us would like to admit.

This is a great, important read that does a good job looking at the long stretch of history. Many might know about the history but haven't had the chance to look at the impact of the events in Tulsa. It's a good example of how history can be applied to understand the social scene of the current day.

One hundred years have passed, but the story continues on. Ellsworth doesn't just look at how it affects descendants, but how it affects the city and the ongoing efforts to remember it.