"Guy Gugliotta had two purposes in writing Taking Down the Klan: To give voice to the victims of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction; and to profileAttorney General Amos T. Akerman, the first lawman to use the Fourteenth Amendment to prosecute civil rights violations. In 1871 he and a few allies used the amendment to destroy the Ku Klux-using York County, South Carolina as an example that reverberated throughout the South. Gugliotta treats readers as if they are following the story when it happens-watching vicious back-and-forth debate in Congress, riding with the Ku Klux on its way to a lynching, feeling what it's like to be lied to, beaten, spat at and left helpless by white neighbors you have known all your life. This has never been done before. Gugliotta uses primary sources almost exclusively-newspapers, documents and first-person accounts. He relies on thousands of pages of testimony taken by a Congressional Committee tasked in 1871 to study the Ku Klux Klan, a breathtaking compilation of first-person accounts by Ku Klux victims, their Ku Klux attackers, local and national politicians, public officials and private citizens. He also uses recently digitized newspaper archives to access multiple stories and opinions about particular events. This new tool gives the narrative a depth of context and immediacy impossible during the age of microfilm"--