Kevin Boyle teaches history at Northwestern University. His work focuses on race, class, and politics in the twentieth-century United States. He is the author of The Shattering: America in the 1960s; Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age ; and The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945–1968. He is coauthor (with Victoria Getis) of Muddy Boots and Ragged Aprons: Images of Working-Class Detroit, 1900–1930 . Arc of Justice received the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Political violence runs through the American experience. In this lecture Kevin Boyle explore two horrific events in modern American history, one from the 1910s, the other from the 1930s. They have no connection whatsoever. Yet once they’re put together they reveal a central dynamic of the brutal violence that has long plagued our nation.