Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction

About this book

The first comprehensive examination of the nineteenth-century Ku Klux Klan since the 1970s Ku-Klux pinpoints the groups rise with startling acuity. Historians have traced the origins of the Klan to Pulaski Tennessee in 1866 but the details behind the groups 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 Klans 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 Klansmens 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.