Nancy MacLean

Nancy MacLean is an American historian and the William H. Chafe Distinguished Professor Emerita of History and Public Policy at Duke University. Her scholarship concentrates on the twentieth-century United States, especially political movements and conflicts involving race, gender, labor, and public policy.

Her books connect institutional politics with the people and organizations working to change society or preserve existing hierarchies. Behind the Mask of Chivalry uses records from the Athens, Georgia, Ku Klux Klan to examine the second Klan’s membership, ideas, and political culture. Freedom Is Not Enough follows campaigns by Black and Mexican American activists, feminists, workers, lawyers, and government allies to challenge discrimination in employment.

Democracy in Chains traces the ideas and networks surrounding political economist James M. Buchanan and the growth of the American libertarian right. Its interpretation prompted substantial scholarly dispute, particularly over its treatment of Buchanan and public-choice theory. The book was nevertheless a 2017 National Book Award finalist in nonfiction and received a Lannan Cultural Freedom Notable Book Award. MacLean was elected a fellow of the Society of American Historians in 2010.

Start with Democracy in Chains, the WebToTell selection. It brings MacLean’s recurring concerns with power, institutions, and organized political strategy into a wide-ranging account of modern American conservatism. Readers interested in civil rights and work should continue with Freedom Is Not Enough.