Jan 18, 2018
President Donald Trump’s election stirred up what some call a
resurgence of white nationalism. But is this a new phenomenon
outside of mainstream America? Or has white nationalism been more
part of American culture than we’ve been willing to admit? Julian
Zelizer and Sam Wang untangle this issue in this episode, which
features historian Linda Gordon, who recently published “The Second
Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American
Political Tradition.” Gordon is a professor of history and a
University Professor of the Humanities at New York University. Her
early books focused on the historical roots of social policy
issues, particularly as they concern gender and family issues. More
recently, she has explored other ways of presenting history to a
broad audience, publishing the microhistory “The Great Arizona
Orphan Abduction” (Harvard University Press, 1999) and the
biography “Dorothea Lange: A Life beyond Limits” (W.W. Norton,
2009), both of which won the Bancroft Prize. She is one of only
three historians to have won this award twice.