Carpetbaggers, Cavalry, and the Ku Klux Klan
Carpetbaggers, Cavalry, and the Ku Klux Klan

Author: J. Michael Martinez

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Published: 2007-03-01

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 0742572617

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In some places, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was a social fraternity whose members enjoyed sophomoric hijinks and homemade liquor. In other areas, the KKK was a paramilitary group intent on keeping former slaves away from white women and Republicans away from ballot boxes. South Carolina saw the worst Klan violence and, in 1871, President Grant sent federal troops under the command of Major Lewis Merrill to restore law and order. Merrill did not eradicate the Klan, but they arguably did more than any other person or entity to expose the identity of the Invisible Empire as a group of hooded, brutish, homegrown terrorists. In compiling evidence to prosecute the leading Klansmen and by restoring at least a semblance of order to South Carolina, Merrill and his men demonstrated that the portrayal of the KKK as a chivalric organization was at best a myth, and at worst a lie. This is the story of the rise and fall of the Reconstruction-era Klan, focusing especially on Major Merrill and the Seventh Cavalry's efforts to expose the secrets of the Ku Klux Klan to the light of day.

Coming for to Carry Me Home
Coming for to Carry Me Home

Author: J. Michael Martinez

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Published: 2011-12-22

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1442215003

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Coming for to Carry Me Home examines the history of the politics surrounding U.S. race relations during the half century between the rise of the abolitionist movement in the 1830s and the dawn of the Jim Crow era in the 1880s. J. Michael Martinez argues that Abraham Lincoln and the Radical Republicans in Congress were the pivotal actors, albeit not the architects, that influenced this evolution. To understand how Lincoln and his contemporaries viewed race, Martinez first explains the origins of abolitionism and the tumultuous decade of the 1830s, when that generation of political leaders came of age. He then follows the trail through Reconstruction, Redemption, and the beginnings of legal segregation in the 1880s. This book addresses the central question of how and why the concept of race changed during this period.

Battle Scars
Battle Scars

Author: Catherine Clinton

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2006-02-23

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 0195174445

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This collection addresses how gender scholarship has changed interpretations of the Civil War. It examines the study of masculinity and war, and deals with issues of health, treason, religion, domesticity, and slavery as they affected Northern and Southern men and women during the Civil War era.

Ku-Klux
Ku-Klux

Author: Elaine Frantz Parsons

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2015-11-09

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 1469625431

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The first comprehensive examination of the nineteenth-century Ku Klux Klan since the 1970s, Ku-Klux pinpoints the group's rise with startling acuity. Historians have traced the origins of the Klan to Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866, but the details behind the group's emergence have long remained shadowy. By parsing the earliest descriptions of the Klan, Elaine Frantz Parsons reveals that it was only as reports of the Tennessee Klan's mysterious and menacing activities began circulating in northern newspapers that whites enthusiastically formed their own Klan groups throughout the South. The spread of the Klan was thus intimately connected with the politics and mass media of the North. Shedding new light on the ideas that motivated the Klan, Parsons explores Klansmen's appropriation of images and language from northern urban forms such as minstrelsy, burlesque, and business culture. While the Klan sought to retain the prewar racial order, the figure of the Ku-Klux became a joint creation of northern popular cultural entrepreneurs and southern whites seeking, perversely and violently, to modernize the South. Innovative and packed with fresh insight, Parsons' book offers the definitive account of the rise of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction.

Women of the Klan
Women of the Klan

Author: Kathleen M. Blee

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2008-12-02

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 9780520942929

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Ignorant. Brutal. Male. One of these stereotypes of the Ku Klux Klan offers a misleading picture. In Women of the Klan, sociologist Kathleen M. Blee dismantles the popular notion that politically involved women are always inspired by pacifism, equality, and justice. In her new preface, Blee reflects on how recent scholarship on gender and right-wing extremism suggests new ways to understand women's place in the 1920s Klan's crusade for white and Christian supremacy.