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Aryan Cowboys: White Supremacists and the Search for a New Frontier, 1970-2000. By Evelyn A. Schlatter. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. xviii, 250 pp. Cloth, $50.00, isbn 978-0-292-71421-2. Paper, $19.95, isbn 9780-292-71471-7.)
Evelyn A. Schlatter's Aryan Cowboys is the most recent attempt by historians and sociologists to explain the rise of right-wing extremist organizations in rural America in the late twentieth century. Using primary materials such as pamphlets and speeches generated by the groups themselves, Schlatter richly details the most important new organizations, including the Aryan Nation, Posse Comitatus, the Order, and the Common Law, as well as militia movements. She reminds us of the violent tactics, antistatism, racism, sexism, and apocalyptic thinking that binds those groups together and makes them a distinct and significant political development in our time.
Schlatter also argues, however, that much of...