President Donald Trump’s election stirred up what some call a resurgence of white nationalism. But is this a new phenomenon outside of mainstream America? Or has white nationalism been more part of American culture than we’ve been willing to admit?

Julian Zelizer and Sam Wang untangle this issue in this episode, which features historian Linda Gordon, who recently published “The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition.”

Gordon is a professor of history and a University Professor of the Humanities at New York University. Her early books focused on the historical roots of social policy issues, particularly as they concern gender and family issues. More recently, she has explored other ways of presenting history to a broad audience, publishing the microhistory “The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction” (Harvard University Press, 1999) and the biography “Dorothea Lange: A Life beyond Limits” (W.W. Norton, 2009), both of which won the Bancroft Prize. She is one of only three historians to have won this award twice.

ABOUT THE HOSTS

Zelizer is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He has been one of the pioneers in the revival of American political history. He is the author of several books including, most recently, "The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society." Zelizer is a frequent commentator in the international and national media on political history and contemporary politics. He has published more than 600 hundred op-eds, including his weekly column on CNN.com.

Wang is professor of neuroscience and molecular biology at Princeton University. He is known for his books "Welcome to Your Brain" and "Welcome to Your Child's Brain" and for his founding role at the Princeton Election Consortium, a blog providing U.S. election analyses. In 2004, Wang was one of the first to aggregate U.S. presidential polls using probabilistic methods. He has also developed new statistical standards for partisan gerrymandering. A neuroscientist, Wang's academic research focuses on the neuroscience of learning, the cerebellum.