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One Hundred Percent American
In the 1920s, a revived Ku Klux Klan burst into prominence as a self-styled defender of American values, a magnet for white Protestant community formation, and a would-be force in state and national politics. But the hooded bubble burst at mid-decade, and the social movement that had attracted several million members and additional millions of sympathizers collapsed into insignificance. Since the 1990s, intensive community-based historical studies have reinterpreted the 1920s Klan. Rather than the violent, racist extremists of popular lore and current observation, 1920s Klansmen appear in these works as more mainstream figures. Sharing a restrictive American identity with most native-born wh...
Battling Demon Rum
A narrative account of the fight to regulate alcohol, from roughly 1800 to the repeal of national prohibition in 1933. An intriguing tale of social reform and of the limits of government-imposed morality. The best short history available of the politics and practices of American temperance reform....Highly recommended. --Library Journal. American Ways Series.
The Second Coming of the KKK
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection An urgent examination into the revived Klan of the 1920s becomes “required reading” for our time (New York Times Book Review). Extraordinary national acclaim accompanied the publication of award-winning historian Linda Gordon’s disturbing and markedly timely history of the reassembled Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. Dramatically challenging our preconceptions of the hooded Klansmen responsible for establishing a Jim Crow racial hierarchy in the 1870s South, this “second Klan” spread in states principally above the Mason-Dixon line by courting xenophobic fears surrounding the flood of immigrant “hordes” landing on American shor...
Ku Klux Kulture
In popular understanding, the Ku Klux Klan is a hateful white supremacist organization. In Ku Klux Kulture, Felix Harcourt argues that in the 1920s the self-proclaimed Invisible Empire had an even wider significance as a cultural movement. Ku Klux Kulture reveals the extent to which the KKK participated in and penetrated popular American culture, reaching far beyond its paying membership to become part of modern American society. The Klan owned radio stations, newspapers, and sports teams, and its members created popular films, pulp novels, music, and more. Harcourt shows how the Klan’s racist and nativist ideology became subsumed in sunnier popular portrayals of heroic vigilantism. In the process he challenges prevailing depictions of the 1920s, which may be best understood not as the Jazz Age or the Age of Prohibition, but as the Age of the Klan. Ku Klux Kulture gives us an unsettling glimpse into the past, arguing that the Klan did not die so much as melt into America’s prevailing culture.
The Ku Klux Klan in Western Pennsylvania, 1921–1928
Relying primarily on a narrative, chronological approach, this study examines Ku Klux Klan activities in Pennsylvania’s twenty-five western-most counties, where the state organization enjoyed greatest numerical strength. The work covers the period between the Klan’s initial appearance in the state in 1921 and its virtual disappearance by 1928, particularly the heyday of the Invisible Empire, 1923–1925. This book examines a wide variety of KKK activities, but devotes special attention to the two large and deadly Klan riots in Carnegie and Lilly, as well as vigilantism associated with the intolerant order. Klansmen were drawn from a pool of ordinary Pennsylvanians who were driven, in part, by the search for fraternity, excitement, and civic betterment. However, their actions were also motivated by sinister, darker emotions and purposes. Disdainful of the rule of law, the Klan sought disorder and mayhem in pursuit of a racist, nativist, anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish agenda.
The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State
“[This] fine history of Prohibition . . . could have a major impact on how we read American political history.”—James A. Morone, New York Times Book Review Prohibition has long been portrayed as a “noble experiment” that failed, a newsreel story of glamorous gangsters, flappers, and speakeasies. Now at last Lisa McGirr dismantles this cherished myth to reveal a much more significant history. Prohibition was the seedbed for a pivotal expansion of the federal government, the genesis of our contemporary penal state. Her deeply researched, eye-opening account uncovers patterns of enforcement still familiar today: the war on alcohol was waged disproportionately in African American, immi...
Prohibition’s Greatest Myths
The word “prohibition” tends to conjure up images of smoky basement speakeasies, dancing flappers, and hardened gangsters bootlegging whiskey. Such stereotypes, a prominent historian recently noted in the Washington Post, confirm that Americans’ “common understanding of the prohibition era is based more on folklore than fact.” Popular culture has given us a very strong, and very wrong, picture of what the period was like. Prohibition’s Greatest Myths: The Distilled Truth about America’s Anti-Alcohol Crusade aims to correct common misperceptions with ten essays by scholars who have spent their careers studying different aspects of the era. Each contributor unravels one myth, rev...
For Business and Pleasure
Mara L. Keire’s history of red-light districts in the United States offers readers a fascinating survey of the business of pleasure from the 1890s through the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. Anti-vice reformers in the late nineteenth century accepted that complete eradication of disreputable pleasure was impossible. Seeking a way to regulate rather than eliminate prostitution, alcohol, drugs, and gambling, urban reformers confined sites of disreputable pleasure to red-light districts in cities throughout the United States. They dismissed the extremes of prohibitory law and instead sought to limit the impact of vice on city life through realistic restrictive measures. Keire’s thoughtful wo...
Human Rights, State Compliance, and Social Change
National Human Rights Institutions (NHRIs) – human rights commissions and ombudsmen – have gained recognition as a possible missing link in the transmission and implementation of international human rights norms at the domestic level. They are also increasingly accepted as important participants in global and regional forums where international norms are produced. By collecting innovative work from experts spanning international law, political science, sociology and human rights practice, this book critically examines the significance of this relatively new class of organizations. It focuses, in particular, on the prospects of these institutions to effectuate state compliance and social change. Consideration is given to the role of NHRIs in delegitimizing – though sometimes legitimizing – governments' poor human rights records and in mobilizing – though sometimes demobilizing – civil society actors. The volume underscores the broader implications of such cross-cutting research for scholarship and practice in the fields of human rights and global affairs in general.
From the Bullet to the Ballot
In this comprehensive history of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party (ILBPP), Chicago native Jakobi Williams demonstrates that the city's Black Power movement was both a response to and an extension of the city's civil rights movement. Williams focuses on the life and violent death of Fred Hampton, a charismatic leader who served as president of the NAACP Youth Council and continued to pursue a civil rights agenda when he became chairman of the revolutionary Chicago-based Black Panther Party. Framing the story of Hampton and the ILBPP as a social and political history and using, for the first time, sealed secret police files in Chicago and interviews conducted with often reticent former members of the ILBPP, Williams explores how Hampton helped develop racial coalitions between the ILBPP and other local activists and organizations. Williams also recounts the history of the original Rainbow Coalition, created in response to Richard J. Daley's Democratic machine, to show how the Panthers worked to create an antiracist, anticlass coalition to fight urban renewal, political corruption, and police brutality.
