MixedThe Nation\"Churchwell has cast a wide net in her research, drawing into account not only politicians and pundits, but also journalists, novelists, ministers, and ordinary Americans. The result, appropriately enough, is a bit messy. Readers hoping for a tidy etymology will doubtless find themselves frustrated at times. But that messiness illustrates the ways in which these phrases have always been, as the historian Daniel Rodgers memorably put it, \'contested truths\' ... Behold, America is the author’s effort to offer this context and to map out [the] multifarious meanings [of the phrases \'the American Dream\' and \'America First\']. Moving back in time from the early 21st century to the early 20th, Churchwell shows that these expressions were originally used in ways that are significantly different from our current understanding of them.\
Linda Gordon
RaveThe NationA slim volume that largely synthesizes the already substantial literature on its subject, The Second Coming of the KKK nevertheless offers readers something new: The book is written, quite self-consciously, for this moment. Unlike other historians who strive for an ever-elusive objectivity, Gordon is refreshingly blunt about who she is and why she wrote it … Despite her lack of sympathy for the Ku Klux Klan, her approach to the group is a model of historical empathy. Unlike a previous generation of liberal and leftist scholars who dismissed far-right movements like the Klan as the result of ‘irrational paranoia,’ Gordon takes her topic quite seriously, and comes away with serious lessons … The chief success of The Second Coming of the KKK is the way in which Gordon makes clear that the organization was not an outlier, but perfectly in tune with its time … They are, as the Klan insisted a century ago, ‘100% American.’
