Kathleen Belew is the keynote speaker for the 2023 S-USIH Conference, in Denver, CO.
Kathleen Belew is an Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University. Before that she spent seven years teaching at the University of Chicago. Belew earned her PhD in American Studies from Yale University. Her first book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard Univ Press, 2018), was widely reviewed in both mainstream and academic venues and has led to multiple media appearances. Belew is widely considered an expert on the white power movement.
Belew’s next book, Home at the End of the World (Random House), will illuminate 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.
Belew’s research for Home at the End of the World will be the basis of her keynote at this year’s meeting of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. Her talk, “Gunchildren: Mass Shootings in Colorado, a History of the Present,” will be Thursday, November 9, at 7:00 pm in the Marco Polo Ballroom at the Curtis Hotel in downtown Denver. There will be a reception before the keynote starting at 6:00 pm. Looking forward to seeing you all there!
This interview is conducted by Andrew Hartman, professor of history at Illinois State University and co-chair (along with Raymond Haberski, Jr) of the 2023 S-USIH Conference.
AH: We are very excited to have you as the keynote this year! I assume most of our members are familiar with your work. But what should we know about you as a historian that we might not know from your first book or your large media presence?
KB: That’s such a kind question! I come to being a capitol-H-historian quite late: my graduate training was in American Studies and my undergrad was in Comparative History of Ideas, so my research has always been story-driven rather than method-driven. But through my teaching and advising, and particularly through my public-facing work, I’ve really drilled down into a fundamental praxis of historical thinking for precarious times.
AH: Bring the War Home is a huge accomplishment. It is also something of a sensation, at least as far as academic history books go. At what point in the long research and writing process, if any, did you think the book might resonate with the zeitgeist?
KB: Bring the War Home was in copyedits when the Unite the Right Rally brought the white power movement into the center of our public debate, in 2017. The book came out in 2018. We elected not to add Charlottesville to the epilogue, and I think that was the right decision—in terms of events to follow, it’s hardly the most notable development. But Charlottesville, the arrests of underground cells, the spate of mass shootings, and January 6 have created an opportunity to deliver the research and arguments of Bring the War Home to the broader public, and I’ve done my best to do so.
AH: The novelty of your argument in Bring the War Home is that you connect the white power and paramilitary movements to the Vietnam War. Did you make this connection early in your research, or is it something that you discovered later in the process? Why is this connection so important?
KB: In grad school, I wanted to research Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, because it struck me that although the U.S. is far from alone in its long histories of racial inequality and racial violence, it’s very odd in how little public conversation we’ve had about that shared history. This was in 2005, so before the National Museum of African-American History or the lynching memorial in Montgomery. I was looking at this small TRC process in Greensboro, NC, that was looking at the 1979 shooting of leftist demonstrators by neo-Nazis and Klansmen, and in their testimony—in 2005—the people in those groups repeated this line about, well, I shot communists in Vietnam, so why wouldn’t I shoot communists in North Carolina? Now, that’s a profound statement: it mixes up wartime and peacetime, homefront and battlefront, and different kinds of enemies. It turned out that this idea appeared throughout what I found was a massive archive of white power activity, and accorded with prior rise-and-fall patterns in Klan membership in the earlier perids.
AH: Conservative and right-wing ideas have always been present in U.S. intellectual history. Same for white supremacist ideas. What is distinct about the intellectual history of contemporary paramilitary America?
KB: In Bring the War Home, I’m chiefly interested in an ideology that—although it aligns with many conservative positions—is fundamentally uninterested in conserving anything about the U.S., but is instead interested in its violent overthrow. The white power movement, animated by apocalyptic fear and intense concern about white reproduction, opposes interracial marriage, integration, social mixing, abortion, feminism, gay rights, etc—but it does so because of an ideology about the birth of white children and the future of the white race.
AH: As a fellow Coloradoan, I’m looking forward to Home at the End of the World. Are you enjoying the challenge of writing about our home state? What makes Colorado an illustrative case study for our era of apocalypse?
KB: Colorado in the 1990s features several major social changes that have also remade American society more broadly: more suburbs, and particularly more rural-fringe suburbs that feature intensifying segregation and isolation; a news cycle hyperfixated on violence, articulating threat to white children and children of color as the source of that danger; and politicization of religion such that it has become indistinguishable from civil society. Add to this mass violence—not only Columbine, but a string of shootings that unfolded in close proximity—and Colorado is a case study for understanding how these factors interplay nationwide.
AH: I was teaching in a Denver-area high school on April 20, 1999, the day of the Columbine High School massacre. I grew up attending Jefferson County Schools, and my father spent his career teaching math at Bear Creek High School, also in Jefferson County and about five miles from Columbine. In fact, my father was friendly with David Sanders, the only teacher killed in the assault. The shooting thus felt very close to home. It felt like the world had changed forever. I’m older than you, but what do you remember about that day? Has researching and writing about Columbine contradicted your memory of it?
KB: I was in high school, in a building with the same floor plan, about fifteen minutes north when the shooting happened. This project is intensely personal for me, because as a historian of violence, I can now understand how many of the things that struck me even then were historically significant. Yes, there are contradictions in my own memory, but there are also things that I can observe and understand because of being part of the community.
AH: No spoilers, but what should expect from your keynote?
KB: This keynote is based on something one of my interviewees mentioned, about the way we refer to “gunmen” when we talk about school shootings, even though these perpetrators are, in many or most cases, children themselves. I’m looking at the category of childhood in relation to gun violence: who gets to be a child and under what conditions. And we will be looking at a much broader category of gun violence than school shootings alone, highlighting the “Summer of Violence,” when a media hyper-fixation created a panic about youth violence in 1993—often with devastating effects for urban communities.
AH: Anything else you would like conference attendees to know about Denver or Colorado? Must-see spots, favorite restaurants, general vibe?
KB: I’m so excited to give this talk, and connect with all of you, in my home city! Check out Tattered Cover Bookstore and Union Station. On Saturday night, join us for a live recording of Historians at the Movies at the Wynkoop Brewery to talk about the most Colorado movie of all time, Red Dawn (Go Wolverines!). I hope we will get great weather so you can hike, enjoy the murals in RiNo, and check out all the great stuff right by the hotel—Denver Art Museum, the Clyfford Still Museum, and, of course, History Colorado.
AH: Thank you so much and see you in November!
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