Witness to Hope

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Richard K. Tucker

In the early 1920s there were about 250,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana. Their principal organizer, and the man who profited most from their membership fees, was D.C. Stephenson, a mysterious drifter with a shady background who arrived in Indiana in 1920 with political experience and an acute sense of the showmanship required for political success, but no beliefs. He used his skills to move to the forefront of the Klan boom. But Stephenson's 1925 murder conviction, stemming from a bizarre and inebriated episode of abduction and rape, ended support for the Klan in Indiana, and discredited many of the state's political leaders. These two books, written for a general audience, tell the story of the rise and fall of the Indiana Klan and Stephenson. Tucker's book ventures more theoretical speculation about the Klan in the North, though he doesn't advance any sustained argument other than to stress, correctly, the Klan's anti-Catholicism. But Tucker exaggerates the Klan's hegemony and gives neither a real sense of the climate and the struggles of the time nor a convincing portrait of Stephenson, who remains a shadowy figure. Lutholtz's thorough book, though it has a sharper focus on Stephenson and Indiana, portrays the political struggles more completely. What is most pertinent is the picture that emerges of the quiet force of bigotry rather than overt Klan power. But Lutholtz resists all theory, so any conclusions about the broader relevance of the strange and fascinating story of Stephenson and the Indiana Klan in the 1920s will have to be drawn by the reader. Lutholtz's book is for larger public library collections.

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William Henry Marquess

Focused on Keats, this study of the development of literary biography in the 19th and early 20th centuries demonstrates the influence and importance of biography as a form. In a dramatic narrative, we see Keats's reputation developing from minor to major poet and follow the increase of his influence on the English and American poets of the century after his death. An introductory section discusses the uses of biography, its place in the English moral tradition, and the present need for a study of it that would parallel the attempt of historiography to explicate the means and ends of history. The state of the art of biography in the early 19th century is discussed, looking back to Boswell and comparing the most outstanding "Romantic" biographies. After analyzing the autobiographical content of Keats's writing to establish the primary materials with which future biographers would work, the book proceeds through the first century of biographies of Keats, showing the importance of his biographers to his rise to prominence, and concluding with the outstanding biographical studies of the last twenty years, based on a more thorough understanding of texts and dates. - Jacket flap.

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Daniel Mark Epstein

Sister Aimee rose to God's challenge, but also found herself a celebrity and personality in the 1920's and 1930's. Epstein traces her history from its roots in her ministry work to her mission and stardom in Hollywood as a revivalist.

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Lois Gould

Compelling and multilayered, Mommy Dressing recounts the author's bittersweet girlhood as the daughter of one of America's first star designers. Lois Gould now offers a memoir that is at once a personal history of her family and a fascinating portrayal of New York's emergence as the world's fashion and glamour capital. Both stories revolve around the central figure of Jo Copeland, a brilliant artist and working mother whose career spanned four decades, from the birth of New York fashion in the 1920s to the close of her own design studio in the 1960s. The story of Jo Copeland's rise to success - in the company of other such early designers as Hattie Carnegie, Claire McCardell, and Vera Maxwell - is also the story of the headstrong, difficult rise of American fashion. And through the lens of Lois Gould's childhood, an interior world as remote and complex as the mother she strove to understand, readers are given a glimpse of the distant landscape of beautiful exteriors that her mother both created and inspired.