Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
2008
Abstract
Stuart A. Wright offers an interesting account of the rise of the Patriot movement in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. Employing insights from social movement theory, he argues that Patriots-that group of Americans who regularly advocated and practiced armed resistance to government authorities in the 1980s and 1990s-emerged at the intersection of the Cold War, race politics of the 1960s, and the farm crisis and the rise of white supremacist groups in the 1980s. Thus, the horror of Timothy McVeigh's destruction of the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, was not the act of a crazed "lone wolf' bent on revenge for specific government acts but part of a broader movement
Comments
Published in Great Plains Research, 18:2 (Fall 2008) p. 247. Copyright © 2008 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln