The KKK remains one of the US's most secretive organisations but photojournalist Anthony S. Karen transcended that secrecy when he got the opprtunity to photograph a KKK ceremony. Since then, he has documented the organisation throughout the US. Taken with unrestricted access, the reader is drawn deep inside this private white nationalist organisation and introduced to a detailed visual account of modern day Klan life. Included are candid shots of rallies, portraits of Klansmen and a look at the naturalisation process for new members.

This timely anthology describes how and why the Ku Klux Klan became one of the most influential social movements in modern American history. For decades historians have argued that the spectacular growth of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s was fueled by a postwar surge in racism, religious bigotry, and status anxiety among lower-class white Americans. In recent years a growing body of scholarship has contradicted that appraisal, emphasizing the KKK's strong links to mainstream society and its role as a medium of corrective civic action. Addressing a set of common questions, contributors to this volume examine local Klan chapters in six Western cities: Denver, Colorado; Salt Lake City, Utah; El Paso, Texas; Anaheim, California; and Eugene and La Grande, Oregon. Far from being composed of marginal men prone to violence and irrationality, the Klan drew its membership from a generally balanced cross section of the white male Protestant population. Overt racism and religious bigotry were major drawing cards for the hooded order, but intolerance frequently intertwined with community issues such as improved law enforcement, better public education, and municipal reform. The authors consolidate, focus, and expand upon new scholarship in a volume that should provide readers with an enhanced appreciation of the complex reasons why the Klan became one of the largest and most significant grass-roots social movements in twentieth-century America.

The author looks back on 130 years of Ku Klux Klan history in Florida, examining their nefarious activities and the official collusion that protected and kept them in power.

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In some places during Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was a social fraternity whose members enjoyed sophomoric high jinks 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 he 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 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. Book jacket.

Fifty years after the end of the Civil War, William Joseph Simmons, a failed Methodist minister, formed a fraternal order that he called The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Organised primarily a money-making scheme, it shared little but its name with the Ku Klux Klan of the reconstruction Era. This original and meticulously researched history of America's second Ku Klux Klan presents many new and fascinating insights into this unique and important episode in American History.