Loyola University Maryland history professors Thomas Pegram, Ph.D., R. Keith Schoppa, Ph.D., and Kelly DeVries, Ph.D., have written new books on a range of topics, adding to an already impressive list of publications by faculty in the history department.
Pegram’s book, One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, chronicles the distinctive incarnation of the Klan during a time when up to five million Americans belonged to the ‘mass movement’ that extended from the southwest to New England. An expert in modern-American political and institutional history, Pegram pieces together decades of scholarship and research about small outposts of the Klan to explain how the organization rose to prominence and ultimately fell apart.
Schoppa is the Doehler Chair of Asian History at Loyola. His book, In a Sea of Bitterness: Refugees during the Sino-Japanese War, describes the experience of millions of Chinese refugees who fled a Japanese invasion in 1937, with a focus on the province of Zhejiang on the central Chinese coast. Schoppa recounts the stories of heroes and villains, bravery and poor choices, and the culture shock felt by refugees who traveled into China’s interior only to find that the country’s modernization was exclusive to the populated port cities they left behind.
DeVries co-authored Besieged Rhodes: A New History with independent museum consultant and author Robert Douglas Smith. The book uses eyewitness accounts, surviving guns and extant walls to deconstruct in detail the story of two sieges of the island of Rhodes and its crusading order of warrior monks by the powerful Ottomans around the turn of the sixteenth century. DeVries and Smith explore the wider relationship between the development of gunpowder weapons and the fortifications built to defend against them, and include detailed appendices with a wealth of images of the cannon and walls.
For more information or questions regarding this story, contact Media Relations Manager Nick Alexopulos at nalexopulos@loyola.edu or 410-617-5025.