Boasting 4 to 6 million members, the reassembled Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s dramatically challenged our preconceptions of hooded Klansmen, who through violence and lynching had established a Jim Crow racial hierarchy in the 1870s South. Responding to the 'emergency' posed by the flood of immigrants - Irish and Italians, 'self-centred Hebrews', and 'sly Orientals' - this 'second Klan', as award-winning historian Linda Gordon vividly chronicles, spread across America. Condemning liberal, 'urban' vices like liquor, prostitution, movies and jazz as Catholic and Jewish 'plots' to subvert American values, the rejuvenated Klan became entirely mainstream, attracting middle-class men and women. It gre to include elaborate secret rituals and mass 'Klonvocations' before collapsing amid revelations of sordid sexual scandals, financial embezzlement, and Ponzi-like schemes. The Klan's brilliant melding of Christian values with racial bigotry and its lightning-like accretion of political power now becomes a sobering parable for the twenty-first century.

Threat to Democracy: The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s: A Warning from History

Linda Gordon

History

Amberley Publishing

Winner of the 2010 Bancroft Prize and finalist for the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography: The definitive biography of a heroic chronicler of America's Depression and one of the 20th century's greatest photographers. We all know Dorothea Lange's iconic photos—the Migrant Mother holding her child, the shoeless children of the Dust Bowl—but now renowned American historian Linda Gordon brings them to three-dimensional life in this groundbreaking exploration of Lange's transformation into a documentarist. Using Lange's life to anchor a moving social history of 20th-century America, Gordon masterfully re-creates bohemian San Francisco, the Depression, and the Japanese-American internment camps. Gordon has written a sparkling, fast-moving story that testifies to her status as one of the most gifted historians of our time.

Dorothes Lange

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio

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Books by Linda Gordon