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Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan. By Nancy MacLean. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. xviii, 292 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-19-07234-0.)
Nancy MacLean's account of the Ku Klux Klan in Athens, Georgia, in the 1920s is an ambitious addition to a now long list of revisionist local studies of the Klan. It is the first of these books to focus on a southern community or state, and the first to place gender squarely at the center in explaining the extraordinary popularity of the men's Klan.
MacLean's strongest contribution is her analysis of the Klan's ideology, which she refracts through the familiar prism of gender, race, and class. While it is well established that the Klan saw itself as the protector of "white womanhood," MacLean deepens our understanding of how the...