- Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1883), 467–469; “Statistics from the Civil War,” Facing History and Ourselves,” accessed June 23, 2019, https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/statistics-civil-war.
- Michele K. Gillespie and Randal L. Hall, eds., Thomas Dixon Jr. and the Birth of Modern America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009). Dixon also produced eighteen films, though none were as successful as Birth of a Nation; see Anthony Slide, American Racist: The Life and Films of Thomas Dixon (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004). Various numbers were reported for lynchings; see, “History of Lynchings,” NAACP, accessed June 5, 2019, https://www.naacp.org/history-of-lynchings/; and Ida B. Wells, A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States, 1892–1893–1894 (Chicago, 1895).
- On the origins and morphing meanings of “America First,” see Sarah Churchwell, Behold, America: The Entangled History of “America First” and “The American Dream” (New York: Basic Books, 2018). On whiteness as a category, see Emily Bazelon, “White People Are Noticing Something New: Their Own Whiteness,” New York Times Magazine, June 13, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/magazine/white-people-are-noticing-something-new-their-own-whiteness.html. Laurie Kellman, “McConnell on Reparations for Slavery: Not a ‘Good Idea,’” Associated Press, June 18, 2019, https://www.apnews.com/e79abc3b64e7400ea961f2fe99a73dc6.
- Prasenjit Duara, “Development and the Crisis of Global Nationalism,” Brookings Institution, October 4, 2018, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2018/10/04/development-and-the-crisis-of-global-nationalism/; Stephen A. Crockett, Jr., “Trump Rally Brings Out White Supremacist ‘Proud Boys’ Wearing Matching Polos,” The Root, June 19, 2019, https://www.theroot.com/trump-rally-brings-out-white-supremacist-prouds-boys-1835658960.
- Dixon is popular with “intellectual” white supremacists such as Jared Taylor, who don’t think he’s a great writer but a powerful one; see Jared Taylor, “Race and Literature: Why Is It Always Liberal?,” American Renaissance, January 20, 2012, https://www.amren.com/features/2012/01/race-and-literature/. Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Vintage, 2011), esp. parts one and two. Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
- For more on cross-burnings and other Klan activity, see Sandhya Somashekhar, “The Confederate Flag Resurged. The KKK Burned a Cross. Racial Tensions Flared in a Southern Town,” Washington Post, February 2, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/the-confederate-flag-resurgedthe-kkk-burned-a-cross-racial-tensions-flared-in-a-southern-town/2018/02/02/5d3da728-df86-11e7-bbd0-9dfb2e37492a_story.html?utm_term=.50cb08b8b7c6; and Harold Gater, “Another Burned Cross Found in Lawrence County,” Mississippi Clarion Ledger, August 8, 2018, https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2018/08/08/another-mississippi-burned-cross/938230002/. Petula Dvorak, “Trump Lit the Torches of White Supremacy in Charlottesville. We Must Extinguish Them,” Washington Post, August 13, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trump-lit-the-torches-of-white-supremacy-in-charlottesville-we-must-extinguish-them/2017/08/13/6cb02b94-8014-11e7-902a-2a9f2d808496_story.html?utm_term=.c3d093a0c6b5. Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone with the Wind,” Letters, 1936–1949, ed. Richard Harwell (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 52–53.
- W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New Brunswick: Transaction Press, 1984), 240. Edward A. Pollard was first to cast the Civil War as a clash between “two nations of opposite civilizations,” one “chivalric” and cultivated, the other mercantile and hopelessly bourgeois. The Lost Cause; A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates (New York: E. B. Treat, 1866), 47. See “A Brief History of Jim Crow,” Constitutional Rights Foundation, accessed June 17, 2019, http://www.crf-usa.org/black-history-month/a-brief-history-of-jim-crow. Allen G. Breed, “‘The Lost Cause’: The Women’s Group Fighting for Confederate Monuments,” Guardian, August 10, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/10/united-daughters-of-the-confederacy-statues-lawsuit. On Lost Cause novels and other literary expressions of Confederate sentiment, see Diane Roberts, The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and Region (New York: Routledge, 1994). Shirley Temple starred in The Littlest Rebel and The Little Colonel, both directed by David Butler and released in 1935. “The king over the water” refers to Charles Edward Stuart, the “Young Pretender” hoping to recover the British throne for the Stuarts. The romanticized failure of “Bonnie Prince Charlie” became a Scottish “Lost Cause.” As Tom Lehrer says in “The Folksong Army” on his 1965 album That Was the Year That Was, while the oppressors “may have won all the battles, / We had all the good songs.”
- John David Smith and J. Vincent Lowery, eds., The Dunning School: Historians, Race, and the Meaning of Reconstruction (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2013); John W. Burgess, Reconstruction and the Constitution (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905), 133.
- Thomas Dixon Jr., The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1970), 275.
- Dixon, Clansman, 219; Kevin Sullivan, “‘Evil, Evil, Evil as Can Be’: Emotional Testimony as Dylann Roof Trial Begins,” Washington Post, December 7, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/12/07/as-dylann-roof-trial-begins-prosecutor-describes-each-victims-life-andhow-they-died/?utm_term=.0859a7575717; Kelly Weill, “Alt-Right Charlottesville Marcher Brandon Higgs Accused of Trying to Kill Black Men,” The Daily Beast, February 12, 2019, https://www.thedailybeast.com/alt-right-charlottesville-marcher-brandon-higgs-accused-of-trying-to-kill-black-men; Eric Goldstein, “‘Now Is the Time to Show Your True Colors’: Southern Jews, Whiteness, and the Rise of Jim Crow,” in Jewish Roots in Southern Soil: A New History, eds. Marcie Cohen Ferris and Mark I. Greenberg (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2006), 134–155; Daniel Lombroso and Yoni Appelbaum, “‘Hail Trump!’: White Nationalists Salute the President-Elect,” Atlantic, November 21, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/richard-spencer-speech-npi/508379/; Morgan Winsor, “Woman Who Called Michelle Obama an ‘Ape in Heels’ Pleads Guilty to FEMA Fraud,” ABC News, February 18, 2019, https://abcnews.go.com/US/woman-called-michelle-obamaape-heels-pleads-guilty/story?id=61142401; Kelly Wynne, “Roseanne Barr on Valerie Jarrett: ‘I Thought She Was White,’” Newsweek, June 24, 2018, https://www.newsweek.com/roseanne-barr-valerie-jarretti-thought-she-was-white-racist-tweet-993060.
- See Slide, American Racist, for biographical information on Dixon.
- Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2016); Daniel R. Vollaro, “Lincoln, Stowe, and the ‘Little Woman/Great War’ Story: The Making, and Breaking, of a Great American Anecdote,” Journal of Abraham Lincoln Association 30, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 18–34, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.2629860.0030.104; David S. Reynolds, Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America (New York: Norton, 2012); Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (New York: Harper, 2014); “Confederate States of America—Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union,” The Avalon Project, Yale Law School, accessed June 24, 2019, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp.
- Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (New York: Penguin, 1989), 149–151; Samuel Morton, Crania Americana (Philadelphia: J. Dobson, 1839).
- Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916), 60. Roosevelt wrote Grant a letter which was printed as a blurb praising the book; see Jedediah Purdy, “Environmentalism’s Racist History,” New Yorker, August 13, 2015, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/environmentalisms-racist-history. Adam Serwer, “White Nationalism’s Deep American Roots,” Atlantic, April 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/04/adam-serwer-madison-grant-white-nationalism/583258/.
- Ta-Nehisi Coates, “My President Was Black,” Atlantic, January/February 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/01/my-president-was-black/508793/. On black office holders during Reconstruction, see “Reconstruction’s New Order,” History, Art and Archives, United States House of Representatives, accessed May 15, 2019, https://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/BAIC/Historical-Essays/Fifteenth-Amendment/Reconstruction/; and Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996). For an account of the fraught 1876 presidential election and the Compromise of 1877 that resulted in the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, see Roy Morris Jr., Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden and the Stolen Election of 1876 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003). Thomas Dixon Jr., The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, 1865–1900 (New York: Doubleday, 1902), 188.
- Dixon, Clansman, 264, 266.
- W. E. B. Du Bois, “Reconstruction and Its Benefits,” American Historical Review 15, no. 4 (July 1910): 795; “Rep. Wilson Shouts, ‘You Lie!’ to Obama During Speech,” CNN, September 10, 2009, http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/09/09/joe.wilson/; “Mayor to Quit over Obama Watermelon E-mail,” NBC, February 27, 2009, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/29423045/ns/us_news-life/t/mayor-quit-over-obama-watermelon-e-mail/#.XOqhOOhKg2w; Alex Seitz-Wald, “Potential Glenn Beck Replacement Eric Bolling’s Racially-Tinged Language: ‘Obama’s Chugging 40’s’ in Ireland,” ThinkProgress, May 24, 2011, https://thinkprogress.org/potential-glenn-beck-replacement-eric-bollings-racially-tinged-language-obama-chugging-40-s-in-ff8e8af05fb1/; Liam Stack, “How the ‘War on Christmas’ Controversy Was Created,” New York Times, December 19, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/19/us/war-on-christmas-controversy.html.
- William H. Frey, “The U.S. Will Become ‘Minority White’ in 2045, Census Projects,” Brookings Institution, March 14, 2018, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2018/03/14/the-us-will-become-minority-white-in-2045-census-projects/; Fiona Blackshaw, ed., “Nine Charts About Wealth Inequality in America (Updated),” Urban Institute, October 5, 2017, https://apps.urban.org/features/wealth-inequality-charts/; Charles M. Blow, “White Extinction Anxiety,” New York Times, June 24, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/24/opinion/america-white-extinction.html; “National Emergency: Is There a Crisis on the U.S.–Mexico Border,” BBC, February 15, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44319094; Philip Bump, “Rep. Steve King Warns That ‘Our Civilization’ Can’t be Restored with ‘Somebody Else’s Babies,’” Washington Post, March 12, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/03/12/rep-steve-king-warns-that-our-civilization-cant-be-restored-with-somebody-elses-babies/?utm_term=.7d4bb0a727f5; Gavin Evans, “The Unwelcome Revival of ‘Race Science,’” Guardian, March 2, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/02/the-unwelcome-revival-of-race-science; Julia Belluz, “DNA Scientist James Watson Has a Remarkably Long History of Sexist, Racist Public Comments,” Vox, January 15, 2019, https://www.vox.com/2019/1/15/18182530/james-watson-racist; Eli Watkins and Abby Phillip, “Trump Decries Immigrants from ‘Shithole Countries’ Coming to the U.S.,” CNN, January 12, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/11/politics/immigrants-shithole-countries-trump/index.html. See also Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016).
- Dixon, Leopard’s Spots, 398.
- Aaron Blake, “Alabama Was a Final Holdout on Desegregation and Interracial Marriage. It Could Happen Again on Gay Marriage,” Washington Post, February 9, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/02/09/alabama-was-a-final-holdout-on-desegregation-and-interracial-marriage-it-could-happen-again-on-gay-marriage/?utm_term=.31597b1714ca; Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” Breitbart, March 29, 2016, https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-tothe-alt-right/; David A. Graham, “Charlottesville Was a Turning Point,” Atlantic, April 29, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/trump-biden-and-charlottesville/588274/.
- The Raleigh Times, January 25, 1906; Kathleen Dalton, Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life (New York: Knopf, 2002), 216; “N—-rs in the White House,” Sedalia Sentinel (MO), October 25, 1901.
- William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Random House, 1936), 112; Graham, “Charlottesville”; Dixon, Clansman, 304; Dixon, Leopard’s Spots, 126, 375; Thomas F. Dixon Jr., The Flaming Sword (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2005), 138.
- Foner, Reconstruction, 430. Tourgée went on to litigate Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. William Faulkner, Light in August (New York: Harrison Smith & Robert Haas, 1932), 315–316.
- Michael D’Orso, Like Judgment Day: The Ruin and Redemption of a Town Called Rosewood (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1996); Dan T. Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007); Gilbert King, The Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America (New York: Harper, 2013); James O. Heath, To Face Down Dixie: South Carolina’s War on the Supreme Court in the Age of Civil Rights (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017), 156; Wilkerson, Other Suns, 303.
- Emma Bowman, “The Women Behind the ‘Alt-Right,’” NPR, August 20, 2017, https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544134546/the-women-behind-the-alt-right; Graham Lanktree, “Trump Says Immigrant Gang Members ‘Slice and Dice’ Young, Beautiful Girls,” Newsweek, July 26, 2017, https://www.newsweek.com/trump-says-immigrant-gang-members-slice-and-dice-young-beautiful-girls-642046.
- Gabrielle Bruney, “Breaking Down Donald Trump’s Deranged Involvement in the Central Park Five Case,” Esquire, May 26, 2019, https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a27586174/when-they-seeus-central-park-5-donald-trump/; Oliver Laughland, “Donald Trump and the Central Park Five: The Racially Charged Rise of a Demagogue,” Guardian, February, 17, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/17/central-park-five-donald-trump-jogger-rape-case-new-york.
- Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 706.
- Dixon, Flaming Sword, 220, 452, 443.
- “People See Black Men as Larger, More Threatening Than Same-Sized White Men,” American Psychological Association, March 13, 2017, https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2017/03/black-men-threatening; “Discrimination Pervades Daily Life, Affects Health Across Groups in the U.S., NPR/Harvard/RWJF Poll Shows,” Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, October 24, 2017, https://www.rwjf.org/en/library/articles-and-news/2017/10/discrimination-pervades-daily-life–affects-health-across-groups.html; Christopher Ingraham, “Why White People See Black Boys like Tamir Rice as Older, Bigger and Guiltier Than They Really Are,” Washington Post, December 28, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/28/why-prosecutors-keep-talking-about-tamir-rices-size-36-pants/?utm_term=.a807c9b7b129; Christina Tkacik, “Bowie State Student’s Stabbing Death at University of Maryland to be Prosecuted as a Hate Crime,” Baltimore Sun, October 17, 2017, https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/bs-md-bowie-state-death-ruled-hate-crime-20171017-story.html; Maya Eliahou and Christina Zdanowicz, “A White Woman Allegedly Hit a Black Teen, Used Racial Slurs and Told Him to Leave a Pool. Then She Bit a Cop,” CNN, June 29, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/29/us/pool-patrol-paula-south-carolina-trnd/index.html; “Airbnb Owner Blames Her Black Guests’ ‘Lack of Good Nature’ as Reason for Her Neighbor Calling the Police,” Atlanta Black Star, May 10, 2018, https://atlantablackstar.com/2018/05/10/airbnb-owner-blames-black-guests-lack-good-nature-reason-neighbor-calling-police/; Matt Stevens, “Starbucks CEO Apologizes After Arrests of Two Black Men,” New York Times, April 15, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/15/us/starbucks-philadelphia-black-men-arrest.html; Topher Sanders, Kate Rabinowitz, and Benjamin Conarck, “Walking While Black,” ProPublica and Florida Times-Union, November 16, 2017, https://features.propublica.org/walking-while-black/jacksonville-pedestrian-violations-racial-profiling/; Danielle Root and Adam Barclay, “Voter Suppression During the 2018 Midterm Elections,” Center for American Progress, November 20, 2018, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/democracy/reports/2018/11/20/461296/voter-suppression-2018-midterm-elections/.
- “Discussion: Ingraham Denies Saying Anything Racist in Her Televised Racist Segment,” TPM Discussions, August 10, 2018, https://forums.talkingpointsmemo.com/t/discussion-ingraham-denies-saying-anything-racist-in-her-televised-racist-segment/75862/57; Erik Wemple, “Tucker Carlson Said Immigration Makes America ‘Dirtier.’ So an Advertiser Took Action,” Washington Post, December 15, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2018/12/15/tucker-carlson-said-immigration-makes-america-dirtier-so-an-advertiser-took-action/?utm_term=.f315aee97d00; Hatewatch Staff, “The Biggest Lie in the White Supremacist Propaganda Playbook: Unraveling the Truth About ‘Black-On-White-Crime,’” Southern Poverty Law Center, June 14, 2018, https://www.splcenter.org/20180614/biggest-lie-white-supremacist-propaganda-playbook-unraveling-truth-about-%E2%80%98black-white-crime; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, xiv. On immigration from nations outside Northern Europe, see G. K. Peatling, “Thomas Dixon, Scotch-Irish Identity and ‘The Southern People,’” Safundi 9, no. 3 (July 2008): 239–256.
