In The Fiery Cross, Wyn Craig Wade traces the Klan from its beginnings after the Civil War as a social club in Pulaski, Tennessee, to the present. Wade provides us with the history of the group, which has gone through a number of declines and renaissances over the last hundred years. We follow the Klan's resurgence in 1915 after D.W. Griffith's epic film The Birth of a Nation depicted Klan members as heroic saviors of the old Southern society, to the swearing in of President Warren G. Harding as a Klansman in the Green Room, and from the Klan's championing of white supremacy as a response to the Civil Rights movement in the 60s, to their present day activities, aligning themselves with a variety of neo-fascist and right-wing groups in the American West. Finally, Wade provides us with an assessment of the Klan's future.

Oxford University Press, 1998.
ISBN: 9780195123579. 526 pp.
Softcover. Very good.