In this talk, Cameron Givens will discuss the intense racial violence that marked the American home front in the aftermath of the First World War in conversation with Kathleen Belew, Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University, who will join the program virtually.
Joined by Black communities across the nation, many Black veterans adopted an increasingly militant and race-conscious form of mass politics in an attempt to make American democracy live up to its professed ideals. In response, White Americans sought to violently reinscribe postwar racial boundaries, primarily through a series of racial massacres that reached from Chicago and Washington, D.C. to Elaine, Arkansas and Tulsa, Oklahoma. As part of these diametrically opposed agendas, both groups drew from the conflict’s rhetoric, actors, tactics, and technology so heavily that distinctions of battlefront-home front and wartime-peacetime began to fade. Ultimately, the scale and nature of White violence revealed the extent to which the First World War destabilized and then brutally crystallized the nation’s racial landscape.
Kathleen Belew is a historian, author, and teacher. She specializes in the history of the present. She spent ten years researching and writing her first book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard, 2018, paperback 2019). In it, she explores how white power activists created a social movement through a common story about betrayal by the government, war, and its weapons, uniforms, and technologies. By uniting Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi, skinhead, and other groups, the movement mobilized and carried out escalating acts of violence that reached a crescendo in the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City. This movement was never adequately confronted, and remains a threat to American democracy. Her next book, Home at the End of the World, illuminates our era of apocalypse through a history focused on her native Colorado where, in the 1990s, high-profile kidnappings and murders, right-wing religious ideology, and a mass shooting exposed rents in America’s social fabric, and dramatically changed our relationship with place, violence, and politics (Random House)
Cameron Givens is a Ph.D. candidate in Ohio State’s History Department, and the Hayes Chair GRA to Professor Chris Nichols, who studies the connections between wartime, conspiracy, and the politics of race and citizenship in the early-twentieth United States. His dissertation, “White Scare: The First World War and the Decade That Made Modern America, 1914-1924,” argues that conflict produced a novel articulation of white nationalism that centered on racially unequal claims to loyalty and national belonging. He has published articles in Modern American History, 20 &21: Revue d'histoire, and The Journal of American Ethnic History; authored shorter pieces in TIME magazine and the Washington Post; and served as co-editor, with Bruno Cabanes, of Globalizing the History of the World Wars, an edited volume under contract with Cambridge University Press. His work has been recognized by the Gerda Henkel Scholarship, awarded each year to the most promising dissertations by the International Research Center of the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Europe’s leading institution for the study of the First World War. Next year, he will join the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University as the H. Ross Perot Sr. Postdoctoral Fellow.
