A stunning history of the first national anti-terrorist campaign waged on American soil—when Ulysses S. Grant wielded the power of the federal government to dismantle the KKK The Ku Klux Klan, which celebrated historian Fergus Bordewich defines as “the first organized terrorist movement in American history,” rose from the ashes of the Civil War. At its peak in the early 1870s, the Klan boasted many tens of thousands of members, no small number of them landowners, lawmen, doctors, journalists, and churchmen, as well as future governors and congressmen. And their mission was to obliterate the muscular democratic power of newly emancipated Black Americans and their white allies, often by the most horrifying means imaginable. To repel the virulent tidal wave of violence, President Ulysses S. Grant waged a two-term battle against both armed Southern enemies of Reconstruction and Northern politicians seduced by visions of postwar conciliation, testing the limits of the federal government in determining the extent of states’ rights. In this book, Bordewich transports us to the front lines, in the hamlets of the former Confederate States and in the marble corridors of Congress, reviving an unsung generation of grassroots Black leaders and key figures such as crusading Missouri senator Carl Schurz, who sacrificed the rights of Black Americans in the name of political “reform,” and the ruthless former slave trader and Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest. Klan War is a bold and bracing record of America’s past that reveals the bloody, Reconstruction-era roots of present-day battles to protect the ballot box and stamp out resurgent white supremacist ideologies.

Step backstage in this look at little-known and utterly fascinating aspects of Jazz Age Louisiana. New Orleans' early jazz greats like Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Kid Ory and Buddy Bolden had fascinating careers, but Hidden History of Louisiana's Jazz Age is filled with tales of murder, lust and adventure. Clarinetist Joe Darensbourg of Baton Rouge ran away and joined the circus three times before the age of 20. The Martel Band of Opelousas witnessed a legal public hanging of a convicted serial murderer in 1923 Evangeline Parish. Trumpeter Evan Thomas of Crowley could have been a rival to Satchmo but was cut down on the bandstand in the Promised Land neighborhood of Rayne, La. Author Sam Irwin explores the odd and quirky in these fascinating stories of the Roaring Twenties.

A Texan's times and travels.

From Al Jolson in blackface to Song of the South, there is a long history of racism in Hollywood film. Yet as early as the 1930s, movie studios carefully vetted their releases, removing racially offensive language like the “N-word.” This censorship did not stem from purely humanitarian concerns, but rather from worries about boycotts from civil rights groups and loss of revenue from African American filmgoers. Cinema Civil Rights presents the untold history of how Black audiences, activists, and lobbyists influenced the representation of race in Hollywood in the decades before the 1960s civil rights era. Employing a nuanced analysis of power, Ellen C. Scott reveals how these representations were shaped by a complex set of negotiations between various individuals and organizations. Rather than simply recounting the perspective of film studios, she calls our attention to a variety of other influential institutions, from protest groups to state censorship boards. Scott demonstrates not only how civil rights debates helped shaped the movies, but also how the movies themselves provided a vital public forum for addressing taboo subjects like interracial sexuality, segregation, and lynching. Emotionally gripping, theoretically sophisticated, and meticulously researched, Cinema Civil Rights presents us with an in-depth look at the film industry’s role in both articulating and censoring the national conversation on race.

From the secrets of Joliet Penitentiary to the ferocious gunfights between the Ku Klux Klan and the Shelton Gang, Troy Taylor takes the measure of the dishonest sweat and innocent blood poured into the prairies of Northern Illinois. Meet the "fallen angels" of Decatur's red-light district, the Springfield counterfeiters who bungled stealing Lincoln's bones and the Aurora man who propped up his porch with the heads of his wife and brother-in-law. And if you dare, eavesdrop on the chilling confession of a man who left a dancer's corpse to the mercy of the railroad tracks: "So, I pat them on the cheek, call them sweet names, and kill them."

This is a horror story of native American violence. It carries a grim lesson for the whole country. Political doctrines have played no part in the violence and murder that have brought much ill fame to one corner of Illinois. On the map, Williamson is just another county. But in history it is a place in which a strange disease has raged for more than eighty years—a disease marked by a pathological tendency to settle differences by force. Fascinated by this, Paul M. Angle, the well-known historian, set out to discover what really had happened. Through enormous research he has been able to reconstruct the whole story in all its horrible, scarifying detail. Using the best techniques of reportage, without editorializing, without subjective coloration, he has produced a narrative beyond imagination. It begins with the "Bloody Vendetta," a feud that rampaged in the 1870s. It deals with labor's success in organizing coal mines in southern Illinois, an affair that twice blew up in violence. It covers the Herrin Massacre of 1922—perhaps the most shocking episode in the history of organized labor in this country—and the subsequent trials. The Ku Klux Klan provides material for four chapters that come to a climax in a fatal duel between the Klan and its opponents. And it ends with the story of the gang war between Charlie Birger and the Shelton brothers. It is a tale to shake the most phlegmatic reader.

In Aaron Burr County, Alabama, a primitive land still barely recovered from the long-ago Civil War, Hank Grissel makes his living at a most unenviable task: supplying victims for his master, a planter with an insatiable thirst for human blood. By turns fawning and ferocious, cowardly and desperate, Grissel combines incredible crudity with homespun Southern philosophy as he butchers his way across Alabama. With a journalist following the trail of bodies, can this lewd tomcat of a man escape justice? Replete with warring rival Klans, backwoods prophecy, and neo-segregationist politicians, all exploited by the enterprising Grissel, Alabama Vampire is a dark and comic novel of the freakish South, with laughter and horror on every page.