Image: A crowd of 22,000 celebrates the rise of Nazism at a rally in Madison Square Garden, 1939. See also the resource page on American Connections to Nazi Germany.

Books

Scott Beekman: William Dudley Pelley: A Life in Right-Wing Extremism and the Occult.

Russ Bellant: Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party: Domestic fascist networks and their effect on U.S. cold war politics.

Chip Berlet & Matthew N. Lyons: Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort.      

Arnie Bernstein: Swastika Nation: Fritz Kuhn and the Rise and Fall of the German-American Bund.

Alan Brinkley: Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, & the Great Depression.    

Sarah Churchwell: Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream.

Charles Gallagher: Nazis of Copley Square: The Forgotten Story of the Christian Front.

Bradley W. Hart: Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States.

Matthew N. Lyons: Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire.           

Kathryn S. Olmsted: The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler.

Steven J. Ross: Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America.

Leo P. Ribuffo: The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War.

Evelyn A. Schlatter: Aryan Cowboys: White Supremacists and the Search for a New Frontier, 1970–2000.

William H. Schmaltz: Hate: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party.         

Jason Stanley: How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.

Victoria Saker Woeste: Henry Ford’s War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech.

Articles

Joe Allen: When Fascism Was American: Before Donald Trump, there was Father Charles Coughlin, who popularized fascism for Americans in the 1930s.

Russ Bellant (interview): Seven Decades of Nazi Collaboration: America’s Dirty Little Ukraine Secret.

Chip Berlet: Right Woos Left: Populist Party, LaRouchite, and Other Neo-fascist Overtures To Progressives, And Why They Must Be Rejected.

Code Switch Podcast: When Nazis Took Manhattan.         

Matthew N. Lyons: huge amount of articles on his website.

Joshua D. Rothman: It Could Happen Here.

Jason Stanley: many articles on his website.

Richard Steigmann-Gall: Star-spangled fascism: American interwar political extremism in comparative perspective.

Linton Weeks: Nazi Summer Camps In 1930s America?    

Matthew Wills: Henry Ford’s Anti-Semitism: Henry Ford’s newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, published years of anti-Semitic articles, prompting Hitler to call him the “single great man.”

Image: 1936 Nazi map studying U.S. “Restrictions on Negro Rights.”

Books

Bradley W. Hart: Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States.

Stefan Kuhl: The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism.

James Q. Whitman: Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law.

Articles

Silvie Andrews: The (First) Time Nazis Marched in Portland.

Russ Bellant (interview): Seven Decades of Nazi Collaboration: America’s Dirty Little Ukraine Secret.

John Broich: Allied leaders were anti-Nazi, but not anti-racist. We’re now paying the price for their failure.

Lynn Burnett: The American Influence on Nazi Race Law. 

Lynn Burnett: The Global Context of the Civil Rights Movement.

Bradley W. Hart: It started with Nazis: Concerns over foreign agents not just a Trump-era phenomenon. The initial aim of FARA was long forgotten: the prosecution of Nazis for interfering with American democracy.

Ira Katznelson: What America Taught the Nazis: In the 1930s, the Germans were fascinated by the global leader in codified racism—the United States.

Nancy K. MacLean: America’s Brush With Fascism: The second KKK shared a disquieting kinship with European fascist movements. Why did it fail to take over American politics?

Brent Staples: How the Swastika Became a Confederate Flag.

Ishaan Tharoor: What Americans thought of Jewish refugees on the eve of World War II.         

James Q. Whitman: Why the Nazis studied American race laws for inspiration.  

Matthew Wills: Henry Ford’s Anti-Semitism: Henry Ford’s newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, published years of anti-Semitic articles, prompting Hitler to call him the “single great man.”

Featured image: The Eugenics Record Office, in the 1920s, on Long Island.

BOOKS

Lee D. Baker. From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954.

Lee D. Baker. Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture.

Andrew D. Evans. Anthropology at War: World War I and the Science of Race in Germany.

Marilyn Lake & Henry Reynolds. Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality.

Daniel Okrent. The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America.

Alexandra Minna Stern. Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America.

Alexandra Minna Stern. Telling Genes: The Story of Genetic Counseling in America.

ARTICLES

American Public Health Association: Disproportionate Sterilization of Latinos Under California’s Eugenic Sterilization Program, 1920–1945.

Alexandra Fair: Situating Standpoint Magazine: Conservative Journalism and Eugenic Ideology.

Alexandra Fair: Eugenics and the Modern Conservative Movement.          

Audrey Farley: How dismantling welfare continues the legacy of eugenics:  Cuts to the social safety net — often framed as tackling “dependency” — are intertwined with population control.

Justin Gomer & Christopher Petrella: Black Protest, White Backlash, and the History of Scientific Racism.

Linda Gordon: The Last Time a Wall Went Up to Keep Out Immigrants.

Joshua A. Krisch: Haunted Files: The Eugenics Record Office.         

Natalie Lira and Alexandra Minna Stern: Mexican Americans and Eugenic Sterilization: Resisting Reproductive Injustice.     

Mike McPhate: California Today: Wrestling With a Legacy of Eugenics.   

Honor Sachs: The dark side of our genealogy craze.             

Matthew A. Sears: Aristotle, father of scientific racism: How the famous philosopher paved the way for books like “The Bell Curve.”

Kim Severson: North Carolina: Budget Pays Eugenics Victims.     

Sterilization and Social Justice Lab: tons of articles on the history of sterilization, especially in California.

Alexandra Minna Stern: Clarence Thomas’ Linking Abortion to Eugenics Is as Inaccurate as It Is Dangerous.

Alexandra Minna Stern: STERILIZED in the Name of Public Health: Race, Immigration, and Reproductive Control in Modern California.

Christopher D. E. Willoughby: White supremacy was at the core of 19th-century science. Why that matters today.

VIDEOS AND PODCASTS

Disability History Association Podcast: California’s Eugenic Sterilization Program. 

Matthew Frye Jacobson:

• Science, Race and Immigration.
• Race and Ethnicity: Who’s Who and What’s What?
• Goddard, Race and Intelligence (Part One)
• Goddard, Race and Intelligence (Part Two).
• Franz Boas Takes On The Eugenicists.

NPR:

• How A Family Became A Test Case For Forced Sterilizations
• On A ‘Eugenics Registry,’ A Record Of California’s Thousands Of Sterilizations.
• The Supreme Court Ruling That Led To 70,000 Forced Sterilizations.
• The Complicated Relationship Between Puerto Rico And U.S. Mainland.  (About medical experimentations on Puerto Ricans.)
• Eugenics, Anti-Immigration Laws Of The Past Still Resonate Today.

Alexandra Minna Stern: The History of the US Eugenics Movement.

Featured image: Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s infamous 1984 medical school yearbook.

BOOKS

Annemarie Bean; James V. Hatch; & Brooks McNamara (editors.)  Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy.

Douglas A. Jones.  The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North.

W.T. Lhamon Jr.   Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop.

Eric Lott.  Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class.

William J. Mahar.  Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture.

Brian Roberts.  Blackface Nation: Race, Reform, and Identity in American Popular Music, 1812-1925.

ARTICLES

Marc Aronson:  The complicated mix of racism and envy behind blackface: Why we’re still talking about minstrelsy in 2018.

Rhae Lynn Barnes: The troubling history behind Ralph Northam’s blackface Klan photo: How blackface shaped Virginia politics and culture for more than a century. 

Stephen A. Berrey: What Justin Trudeau’s brownface photo says about white innocence. 

Brent Staples:  How Blackface Feeds White Supremacy: A racist caricature from 19th-century minstrel theater still haunts America.

Rhae Lynn Barnes: Yes, politicians wore blackface. It used to be all-American ‘fun.’

Brain Roberts, interviewed about his book Blackface Nation.

Randa Tawil:  Why blackface remains popular on college campuses:  White students use a racist practice to work out their identities — and enforce white supremacy.

Christopher D. E. Willoughby: Blackface is just a symptom of American medicine’s racist past:  The study of medicine is rife with racist assumptions and experiments that still shape health outcomes today.

VIDEOS AND PODCASTS

Rhae Lynn Barnes: links to Democracy Now interview as well as clips of Blackface performances with commentary.    

Interview with historian Eric Lott, about the contemporary resurgence of Blackface.

Featured image: The 90-foot carving on the side of Stone Mountain in Georgia is the largest Confederate monument in the world. Image from the article, “KKK denied permit to burn cross atop symbolic mountain in Georgia.”

See also this collection of articles by historians in the wake of Charlottesville – from Made By History – and historian Kevin M. Levin’s Confederate monuments syllabus.         

BOOKS

David Allison: Controversial Monuments and Memorials.

Keisha N. Blain, Chad Williams, & Kidada E. Williams (editors). Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence.          

Thomas J. Brown: Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America.

Karen L. Cox: Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture.

Adam H. Domby: The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory.

Erika Doss: Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America.    

Claudrena N. Harold & Louis P. Nelson (editors). Charlottesville 2017: The Legacy of Race and Inequity.        

Ethan J. Kytle & Blain Roberts: Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy.

Kevin Levin: Interpreting the Civil War at Museums and Historic Sites.   

Kevin Levin: Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth.

Sanford Levinson: Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies.

Cynthia Mills & Pamela H. Simpson: Monuments To The Lost Cause: Women, Art, And The Landscapes Of Southern Memory.

Kirk Savage: Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America.

Nina Silber: This War Ain’t Over: Fighting the Civil War in New Deal America.

Dell Upton: What Can and Can’t Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South.

ARTICLES

Ana Lucia Araujo: Toppling monuments is a global movement. And it works. Global demonstrations to remove monuments to slavery and colonialism are retaking public spaces.

Bonnie Berkowitz & Adrian Blanco: Confederate monuments are falling, but hundreds still stand. Here’s where.

Keisha N. Blain: Tennessee just showed that white supremacy is alive and well: Honoring a former Confederate general and KKK grand wizard in 2019 is outrageous.

Keisha N. Blain: Destroying Confederate monuments isn’t ‘erasing’ history. It’s learning from it. Defenders of the memorials are the ones trying to forget the past.

Jordan Brasher: Confederate flags fly worldwide, igniting social tensions and inflaming historic traumas.

Michelle D. Brock, Sarah Horowitz, and Molly Michelmore: Why universities should be on the front lines of the monument wars.

Rebekah Bryer: Yes, D.C.’s Emancipation Memorial advances white supremacy: The statue needs more nuance that highlights black agency.

Niels Eichhorn: There’s no easy answer for Confederate monuments: Trying to add more context won’t prevent them from being rallying points for white supremacists and others.

Jonathan Beecher Field: Statue Mania: Focusing only on Confederate monuments misses that racism is memorialized everywhere.

Jonathan Beecher Field: Some Statues Are Like Barbed Wire: Activists fighting to remove statues of slavers and colonizers understand better than most how public memorials can be a form of violence.

Daniel L. Fountain: Why young Southerners still get indoctrinated in the Lost Cause:  Statues can be torn down. The lies on which they were built are harder to topple.

Samuel Gilbert: Protests target Spanish colonial statues that ‘celebrate genocide’ in US west.

Katrina Gulliver: Americans put up statues during the Gilded Age. Today we’re tearing them down: Why the Gilded Age was the era of statues.

Hilary Green: Map of Monument Removals, 2015-2020.

Michael D. Hattem: Columbus never set foot here. Why do we remember him? How our origin story has changed and adapted over time to suit modern political purposes.

Julian Maxwell Hayter:  Charlottesville was about memory, not monuments:  Why our history educations must be better.

Martha Hodes: Why some white Americans see racial equality as oppression: White victimhood’s roots in the Civil War.

Yuliya Komska:  What to do with Confederate monuments: Seven lessons from Germany.  Germany’s struggle with its brutal history provides a useful guide for Americans struggling with theirs.

Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders: Removing Lost Cause monuments is the first step in dismantling white supremacy: African American activists have long coupled these efforts with fighting against racist laws and racial violence.

Megan Kate Nelson: The latest battle over the Confederate flag isn’t happening where you’d expect: How the forgotten fight for the West exposes the meaning of the Confederate flag.

Megan Kate Nelson: Americans Need to Know the Hard Truth About Union Monuments in the West: During the Civil War, Union soldiers in the West weren’t fighting to end slavery, but to annihilate and remove Native Americans.

New York Times Editorial Board: Why Does the U.S. Military Celebrate White Supremacy? It is time to rename bases for American heroes — not racist traitors.

Jennifer Odem: America’s Monuments, Reimagined for a More Just Future: With colonialist statues being toppled in America and beyond, T asked five artists to envision a different kind of memorial, one that embodies this moment of reckoning.

Byron D’Andra Orey: Here’s How Black Power Finally Prevailed in Mississippi State Flag Fight.

Jeffrey Ostler: Trump thinks Andrew Jackson’s statue is a great monument — but to what? The truth about policies of Native American removal.

Elaine Frantz Parsons: We Don’t Have Enough Contempt for Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Stuart Schrader: From Charleston to Rhodesia: Fights over both the Confederate and Rhodesian flags give us a glimpse into the reactionary mind. 

Ty Seidule: West Point and its cadets are not campaign props: Grass-roots civil rights activism — not Confederate monuments — is what heals society.

Nina Silber: Worshiping the Confederacy is about white supremacy — even the Nazis thought so.  Confederate memory nurtured fascism.

Nina Silber: ‘Gone With the Wind’ is also a Confederate monument, but on film instead of stone. Even in its time, the film promoted a racist political message.

Laura Ellyn Smith: It’s not just Confederate monuments that need to come down: Charlottesville focused attention on the Confederacy. But we need to reckon with the era of segregation as well.

Timothy Snyder: Take it from a historian. We don’t owe anything to Confederate monuments. Trump spends so much time defending statues not because he cares about history, but precisely because he doesn’t.

Brent Staples: Monuments to White Supremacy.

Brent Staples: When White Supremacists Ruled Washington: The National Cathedral Just This Month Removed Stained Glass Windows Depicting Confederate Generals.

Anne Twitty: Ole Miss’s Monument to White Supremacy: New evidence shows what the 30-foot-tall Confederate memorial was actually meant to commemorate.  

Kevin Waite: The missing statues that expose the truth about Confederate monuments: Why Confederacy supporters erased the legacy of one its most accomplished soldiers.

Caroline Randall Williams: You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument. The black people I come from were owned and raped by the white people I come from. Who dares to tell me to celebrate them?

Jhacova Williams: Confederate Streets and Black-White Labor Market Differentials.

Victoria W. Wolcott: Six Flags has taken down its Confederate flag. But that’s not the only legacy of Jim Crow at the park.  The history of amusement parks exposes how colorblindness often masked racial exclusion. 

VIDEOS AND PODCASTS

A12:  A12 explores the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, the history behind the conflict, and how the city and its people have dealt with the aftermath.  Presented by historian Nicole Hemmer, who was present that day. 

Hilary Green and Kevin Levin: two scholars weigh in on the history of Confederate monuments.

Image: from NPR’s How Black activists used lynching souvenirs to expose American violence.

Resources

Interactive map of lynchings in U.S. history. See also This Smithsonian article about the project.

The nation’s first memorial dedicated to victims of lynchings opened in 2018: The National Memorial for Peace and Justice.  

Website companion to James Allen’s book Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. 

Ken Gonzales-Day: self-guided walking tour of lynching sites in Los Angeles.

Articles

Brent Campney: Review of At the Alter of Lynching, a book that explores the relationship between southern religion and anti-Black lynching.

William D. Carrigan:  No Ordinary Crime: Reflections on the Future of the History of Mob Violence.

William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb: When Americans Lynched Mexicans.         

Death Penalty Information Center: History of Lynchings of Mexican Americans Provides Context for Recent Challenges to U.S. Death Penalty.

George Diaz: A Review of The Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands.

Equal Justice Initiative: 2015 report on lynching.

Crystal N. Feimster:  Ida B. Wells and the Lynching of Black Women.       

Terence Finnegan: “Politics of Defiance”: Uncovering the Causes and Consequences of Lynching and Communal Violence.

Lawrence B. Glickman: Why President Trump used lynching as a metaphor: The long history of politicians claiming to be victims of lynching and racial violence.

Karlos K. Hill: Are Police Shootings Really Like Lynchings?

Cecily Hilleary: Remembering Native American Lynching Victims.

Brigit Katz: 2018: The U.S. Finally Made Lynching a Federal Crime.           

Kevin Kruse: Twitter thread breaking down the long history of anti-lynching efforts.

Louis P. Masur: Why it took a century to pass an anti-lynching law: A century of political organizing could not overcome a powerful tool of white supremacy — until now.

Michael J. Pfeifer: At the Hands of Parties Unknown? The State of the Field of Lynching Scholarship.

Michael J. Pfeifer: Final Thoughts on the State of the Field of Lynching Scholarship.

Brent Staples: When Southern Newspapers Justified Lynching.

Brent Staples: So the South’s White Terror Will Never Be Forgotten.

Michael Ayers Trotti: The Multiple States and Fields of Lynching Scholarship.     

Margaret Vandiver: Thoughts on Directions in Lynching Research.

Interview with Jason Morgan Ward about his book Hanging Bridge.

Jason Morgan Ward: The Infamous Lynching Site That Still Stands in Mississippi.          

Jason Morgan Ward: Shades of Violence: Jim Crow Justice and Black Resistance in the Depression-Era South.

Kidada E. Williams: Regarding the Aftermaths of Lynching.

Amy Louise Wood: Critical Conversation on Donald Mathews’s ‘The Southern Rite of Human Sacrifice’.

Videos & Podcasts

Historian William Carrigan, discussing the lynching of Mexicans.

NPR interviews with historian Philip Dray, author of At the Hands of Persons Unknown, and James Allen, author of Without Sanctuary.

Lecture by Philip Dray about his book At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America.

2005 Senate apology for refusing to pass anti-lynching legislation for over a century.

Ken Gonzales-Day, discussing his book Lynching in the West.

Ken Gonzales-Day: Run Up, a two-minute recreation of California’s last documented lynching of a Latino.

Karlos K. Hill offering an excellent overview of the history of lynching. 

Karlos K. Hill: A historian of lynching describes his experience of visiting the new memorial to lynching museum.

Past Present Podcast: historians discuss whether “lynching” is the appropriate term to discuss the murder of Ahmaud Arbery in 2020.

Jason Morgan Ward: The Swastika Entwined with Magnolia Blossoms.       

Interview with Amy Louise Wood, author of Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940.

Books

James Allen: Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America.

Dora Apel: Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob.

Dora Apel & Shawn Michelle Smith: Lynching Photographs.

Manfred Berg: Popular Justice: A History of Lynching in America.           

William D. Carrigan: The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836-1916.

William D. Carrigan & Clive Webb: Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States, 1848-1928.

William D. Carrigan & Christopher Waldrep: Swift to Wrath: Lynching in Global Historical Perspective.

Philip Dray: At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America.

Crystal N. Feimster: Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching.

Ken Gonzales-Day: Lynching in the West: 1850–1935.

Karlos K. Hill: Beyond the Rope: The Impact of Lynching on Black Culture and Memory.

Vanessa A. Holloway: Getting Away with Murder: The Twentieth-Century Struggle for Civil Rights in the U.S. Senate.

Donald G. Mathews: At the Altar of Lynching: Burning Sam Hose in the American South.

Ersula J. Ore: Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity.

Michael J. Pfeifer: Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874-1947.

Michael J. Pfeifer: The Roots of Rough Justice: Origins of American Lynching.

Michael J. Pfeifer: Global Lynching and Collective Violence: Volume 2: The Americas and Europe.

Nicholas Villanueva Jr.: The Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands.

Christopher Waldrep: Lynching in America: A History in Documents.

Jason Morgan Ward: Hanging Bridge: Racial Violence and America’s Civil Rights Century.         

Amy Louise Wood: Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940.