Ku-Klux : the birth of the Klan during Reconstruction / Elaine Frantz Parsons.

"This book was published with the assistance of the Anniversary Endowment Fund of the University of North Carolina Press."

Includes bibliographical references (pages 315-375) and index.

The roots of the Ku Klux Klan in Pulaski, Tennessee -- Ku-Klux attacks define a new black and white manhood -- Ku-Klux attacks define Southern public life -- The Ku-Klux in the national press -- Ku-Klux skepticism and denial in Reconstruction-era public discourse -- Race and violence in Union County, South Carolina -- The Union County Ku-Klux in national discourse.

"The first comprehensive examination of the nineteenth-century Ku-Klux Klan since the 1970s, Ku-Klux pinpoints the group's rise with startling acuity. Historians have traced the origins of the Klan to Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866, but the details behind the group's emergence have long remained shadowy. By parsing the earliest descriptions of the Klan, Elaine Frantz Parsons reveals that it was only as reports of the Tennessee Klan's mysterious and menacing activities began circulating in northern newspapers that whites enthusiastically formed their own Klan groups throughout the South. The spread of the Klan was thus intimately connected with the politics and mass media of the North" --