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1919, The Year of Racial Violence recounts African Americans' brave stand against a cascade of mob attacks in the United States after World War I. The emerging New Negro identity, which prized unflinching resistance to second-class citizenship, further inspired veterans and their fellow black citizens. In city after city - Washington, DC; Chicago; Charleston; and elsewhere - black men and women took up arms to repel mobs that used lynching, assaults, and other forms of violence to protect white supremacy; yet, authorities blamed blacks for the violence, leading to mass arrests and misleading news coverage. Refusing to yield, African Americans sought accuracy and fairness in the courts of public opinion and the law. This is the first account of this three-front fight - in the streets, in the press, and in the courts - against mob violence during one of the worst years of racial conflict in U.S. history.

Biography: David F. Krugler grew up in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. He left his home state to attend Creighton University, in Omaha, Nebraska, in the late 1980s. After graduating with degrees in English and history, he earned a M.A. and Ph.D. in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He moved back to Wisconsin in 1997 to teach at the University of Wisconsin--Platteville, where he's now Professor of History. A historian of the modern United States, he has published books on several different topics: Cold War propaganda, nuclear warfare, and racial conflict in the United States. Krugler is the author of The Voice of America and the Domestic Propaganda Battles, 1945-1953 (University of Missouri Press, 2000) and This Is Only a Test: How Washington, D.C., Prepared for Nuclear War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). In December 2014, Cambridge University Press released his third book, 1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back. Krugler frequently serves as a faculty leader for teacher education programs at the Newberry Library in Chicago and the Master of American History and Government program at Ashland University in Ashland, Ohio. He is the past recipient of research grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Organization of American Historians, the White House Historical Association, and the University of Wisconsin System Institute on Race and Ethnicity. He appeared in the National Geographic Channel documentary American Doomsday in 2010. In Spring 2011, he was a fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin--Madison. When he's not teaching and writing, Krugler enjoys overseas travel (most recent trip: Copenhagen, Denmark), going to art museums, and reading mysteries (latest favorite author: Charles Willeford).