A powerful new book ... Collins is a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker who is known for pieces that are often witty and delightful ... Needless to say, They Stole a City is a categorically different kind of book ... I happened to be reading They Stole a City over the July 4 weekend, toggling between Collins’s historical descriptions of a white supremacist paramilitary marching through Wilmington and contemporary news reports of a white supremacist group marching through Washington, D.C. The effect was sobering.
In this brilliant synthesis of scholarly research, archival discovery, and oral history, Collins joins a new generation of historians working in the wake of George Floyd’s murder to interrogate incidents of racial violence (often state-sanctioned) that troubles our past and draw a through line to the present, sounding clarion warnings.
Remarkably successful in its scope and depth, They Stole a City is an urgent argument for reckoning with history in order to understand the present backlash and rising white nationalism.
This well-researched, highly readable work examining the devastating Wilmington coup d’état is shocking and critically important. Essential reading for all academic and public libraries.
In her superb, arresting They Stole a City: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live With Its Legacy, Lauren Collins examines the coup’s history and its aftermath through four families ... This is the kind of book that can change and shape public discourse about racism, history and white supremacy. Collins worked on They Stole a City for more than a decade, and it shows in the depth of her analysis and her sensitivity toward her interviewees.
New Yorker staff writer Collins delivers a scathing history of an infamous act of racial violence ... An urgent work of reportage and historical research that lays bare structural racism past and present.
