Summary: President Donald Trump’s election stirred up what some call a resurgence of white nationalism. But is this a new phenomenon outside of mainstream America? Or has white nationalism been more part of American culture than we’ve been willing to admit? Julian Zelizer and Sam Wang untangle this issue in this episode, which features historian Linda Gordon, who recently published “The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition.” Gordon is a professor of history and a University Professor of the Humanities at New York University. Her early books focused on the historical roots of social policy issues, particularly as they concern gender and family issues. More recently, she has explored other ways of presenting history to a broad audience, publishing the microhistory “The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction” (Harvard University Press, 1999) and the biography “Dorothea Lange: A Life beyond Limits” (W.W. Norton, 2009), both of which won the Bancroft Prize. She is one of only three historians to have won this award twice.
