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William Sheridan Allen’s The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1922-1945 (Quadrangle Books, 1965). It explained the rise of National Socialism in a new and revealing way: from the bottom up. In Sheridan Allen’s story, the local politicians, shopkeepers, and housewives of Northeim (Hanover) moved to the fore, while Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels remained in the background. Here the locals “made history,” and they did so ways that we would all recognize from our own local communities.
Charles McKinney, Jr. has written a similar book, though one with a much happier ending. Greater Freedom: The Evolution of the Civil Rights Struggle in Wilson, North Carolina (UPA, 2010) tells the tale of how one small city in the South negotiated the rough transition from Jim Crow to Civil Rights and beyond.
thenewgreen · 4794 days ago · link ·
I look forward to reading this book. I live about an hour away from Wilson. Wilson was once a huge tobacco town. In Durham (where I live) there is still a huge footprint left from the tobacco trade. NC was/is a moderate state, especially for the south, and this presents itself in Charlotte, Raleigh and Durham (the big cities) but it's not as prevalent in Eastern NC. This creates an interesting juxtaposition in the states civil rights history.
I would suggest skipping to about the 1/4 mark in the interview. This is when they begin talking about the book and not the authors pedigree.