From Julie Carr's website:
"Populism has become a global movement associated with nationalism and strong-man politicians, but its root causes remain elusive. Mud, Blood, and Ghosts exposes one deep root in the soil of the American Great Plains. Julie Carr traces her own family鈥檚 history through archival documents to draw connections between U.S. agrarian populism, spiritualism, and eugenics, helping readers to understand populism鈥檚 tendency toward racism and exclusion.
Carr follows the story of her great-grandfather Omer Madison Kem, three-term Populist representative from Nebraska, avid spiritualist, and committed eugenicist, to explore persistent themes in U.S. history: property, personhood, exclusion, and belonging. While recent books have taken seriously the experiences of poor whites in rural America, they haven鈥檛 traced the story to its origins. Carr connects Kem鈥檚 journey with that of America鈥檚 white establishment and its fury of nativism in the 1920s. Presenting crucial narratives of Indigenous resistance, interracial alliance and betrayal, radical feminism, lifelong hauntings, land policy, debt, shame, grief, and avarice from the Gilded Age through the Progressive Era, Carr asks whether we can embrace the Populists鈥� profound hopes for a just economy while rejecting the barriers they set up around who was considered fully human, fully worthy of this dreamed society."
Check out Carr's 听补苍诲听 with NPR for more information.