Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain - Hardcover

Stock, Catherine McNicol

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801432944 ISBN 13: 9780801432941

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2017

Synopsis

When terrorists blew up the Alfred R. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, a shocked nation could scarcely imagine that the perpetrators were home-grown. If they were, Catherine McNicol Stock explains, they participated in a long tradition of rural extremism. The arrest of Timothy McVeigh, the alleged perpetrator, gave terrorism a face, and it turned out to be the white-skinned, blue-eyed, clean-shaven face of a small-town boy who had served in the Gulf War. The network of militiamen, conspiracists, survivalists, and white supremacists suddenly visible to media attention had been there all along, Stock suggests. They are heirs to a tradition even older than the country itself, characteristically angry and frequently violent, rendering patriotism as intolerance. As early as 1676, rural Virginians took up arms to protest what they considered economic and political injustices, and the fierce protective responses did not stop with the Revolution. Stock examines recurring themes in rural radical movements, including anti-federalism, white supremacy, populism, and vigilantism. These themes suggest to her some of the seemingly contradictory responses implicit in rural discontent. The politically conservative fear of outside power and authority in the form of government, corporations, international institutions, experts, and the media is juxtaposed with the potentially democratic desire to protect and revive community, culture, and the cooperative tradition. Stock believes we need to understand both the historic roots and the diverse manifestations of rural radicalism in order to make some sense of the action that tore a hole in this country's heartland in the spring of 1995.

About this title

Review:

"Catherine McNicol Stock traces the lineage of extremist white rural politics. She draws clear links between contemporary hate groups and a long tradition of rural political movements characterized by a fierce commitment to the rights of small landowners and family farmers, and by a culture of vigilantism. Rural Radicals is a wilde ride."

"A first-rate and highly accessible history of radicalism in rural America."

About the Author:

Catherine McNicol Stock is Associate Professor of History and Director of the American Studies Program at Connecticut College.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0801432944
• ISBN 13: 9780801432941
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 219