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.

Allen C. Guelzo's Reconstruction: A Concise History is a gracefully written interpretation of Reconstruction as a spirited struggle to reintegrate the defeated Southern Confederacy into the American Union after the Civil War, to bring African Americans into the political mainstream of American life, and to recreate the Southern economy after a Northern free-labor model.

This book is Volume VIII of A History of the South, a ten-volume series designed to present a thoroughly balanced history of all the complex aspects of the South's culture from 1607 to the present. Like its companion volumes, The South During Reconstruction is written by an outstanding student of Southern history, E. Merton Coulter, who is also one of the editors of the series.The tragic Reconstruction period still casts its long shadow over the South. In his study, Mr. Coulter looks beyond the familiar political and economic patterns into the more fundamental attitudes and activities of the people. In this dismal period of racial and political bitterness, little notice has been taken of the strivings for reorganization of agriculture under free labor, for industrial and transportation development, for a free-school system and higher education, and for the advance of religious, literary, and other cultural interests. Mr. Coulter's book shows these things to be very real, and they are related to the Radical program, which, conceived both in good and evil, ran its course and finally collapsed.This period forms an important chapter in American history. It is an account of a region, defeated in one of the world's great wars, struggling to rebuild its social and economic structure and to win back for itself a place in the reunited nation.