Elliott J. Gorn – författare

While visiting family in Mississippi in August 1955, Emmett Till allegedly whistled at a white woman working behind the counter of a crossroads country store. Her husband and brother-in-law kidnapped the fourteen-year-old Chicago kid in the middle of the night and tortured, beat, and shot him. Three days later, his body rose from the Tallahatchie River, a cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire.Confronting her son's nightmarishly disfigured face, Mamie Till-Mobley decided that his funeral in Chicago would be open-casket. "Let the people see what they did to my boy." The South Side church where her son's body lay in state kept its doors open day and night. More than one hundred thousand people came and saw his face. Millions more stared at the photographs of it published in the African-American press, especially Jet magazine and the Chicago Defender. The pictures galvanized the black community. Journalists and activists drove down to the Mississippi Delta, and risked their lives interviewing townsfolk, encouraging witnesses, spiriting those in danger out of the region, and above all keeping the news cycle turning. Less than a month after Till's murder, despite strong evidence, a fair-minded judge, and prosecutors eager for a conviction, an all-white jury found Till's killers not guilty.For black Americans, the Till lynching and acquittal was a defining moment. Muhammad Ali, Rosa Parks, Anne Moody, John Lewis, and countless others later said that it changed their lives. They were "the Emmett Till generation," and they would help lead the greatest mass movement in twentieth-century America. His story haunts us still, its meanings blurring and shifting with time. Documentaries, histories, memoirs, and oral testimony have revealed new facts. In 2005, fifty years after the lynching, his murderers long dead, the FBI reopened the Till case. They reopened it again the summer of 2018, after new revelations came to light.Building on all the material, old and new, Elliott J. Gorn offers the most complete and immersive account of Emmett Till's story. Let the People See also probes its enduring truths, truths we confront with each fresh spasm of racial violence. Till is more with us today than at any time since 1955, his name invoked whenever another young black man falls victim. His face remains the face of racism, and, as Gorn shows us in this haunting and definitive account, we cannot turn away from it.

In an era that witnessed the rise of celebrity outlaws like Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger was the most famous and flamboyant of them all. Reports on the man and his misdeeds--spiced with accounts of his swashbuckling bravado and cool daring--provided an America worn down by the Great Depression with a salacious mix of sex and violence that proved irresistible. In Dillinger's Wild Ride, Elliott J. Gorn provides a riveting account of the year between 1933 and 1934, when the Dillinger gang pulled over a dozen bank jobs, and stole hundreds of thousands of dollars. A dozen men--police, FBI agents, gangsters, and civilians--lost their lives in the rampage, and American newspapers breathlessly followed every shooting and jail-break. As Dillinger's wild year unfolded, the tale grew larger and larger in newspapers and newsreels, and even today, Dillinger is the subject of pulp literature, serious poetry and fiction, and films, including a new movie starring Johnny Depp. What is the power of his story? Why has it lingered so long? Who was John Dillinger?Gorn illuminates the significance of Dillinger's tremendous fame and the endurance of his legacy, arguing that he represented an American fascination with primitive freedom against social convention. Dillinger's story has much to tell us about our enduring fascination with outlaws, crime and violence, about the complexity of our transition from rural to urban life, and about the transformation of America during the Great Depression. Dillinger's Wild Ride is a compulsively readable story with an unforgettable protagonist.

Constructing the American Past: A Sourcebook of a People's History, Ninth Edition, presents an innovative combination of case studies and primary source documents that allow students to discover, analyze, and construct history from the actors' perspective.Beginning with Christopher Columbus and his interaction with the Spanish crown in 1492, and ending in the Reconstruction-era United States, Constructing the American Past provides eyewitness accounts of historical events, legal documents that helped shape the lives of citizens, and excerpts from diaries that show history through an intimate perspective. The authors expand upon past scholarship and include new material regarding gender, race, and immigration in order to provide a more complete picture of the past.

Constructing the American Past: A Sourcebook of a People's History, Ninth Edition, presents an innovative combination of case studies and primary source documents that allow students to discover, analyze, and construct history from the actors' perspective.Beginning with Reconstruction-era United States and ending with modern conservatism at the end of the twentieth century, Constructing the American Past provides eyewitness accounts of historical events, legal documents that helped shape the lives of citizens, and excerpts from diaries that show history through an intimate perspective. The authors expand upon past scholarship and include new material regarding gender, race, and immigration in order to provide a more complete picture of the past.

Everyone knows the story of the murder of young Emmett Till. In August 1955, a fourteen-year-old Chicago boy was murdered in Mississippi for having--supposedly--flirted with a white woman named Carolyn Bryant, who was working behind the counter of a store. Emmett was taken from the home of a relative later that night by white men; three days later, his naked body was recovered in the Tallahatchie River, weighed down by a cotton-gin fan. Till's killers were acquitted, but details of what had happened to him became public; the story gripped the country and sparked outrage. Black journalists drove down to Mississippi and risked their lives interviewing townsfolk, encouraging frightened witnesses, spiriting those in danger out of the region, and above all keeping the news cycle turning. It continues to turn. The murder has been the subject of books and documentaries, rising and falling in number with anniversaries and tie-ins, and shows no sign of letting up. Some have argued that his lynching did more to launch the Civil Rights movement than Rosa Parks or even Brown v. Board of Education. If that argument holds, it is in large part because of the photographs of Emmett Till--the before-photo of a young man jaunty with prospects, and the after-photos of the grotesquely disfigured face of a young man beaten to death and shot. The photographs, first reprinted in African-American journals and newspapers, didn't make their way to their white equivalents until much later, but they focused attention on the horrible, visceral truth of racism. It became impossible to turn away from them. The Till murder continues to haunt the American conscience. Fifty years later, in 2005, the FBI reopened the case. New papers and testimony have come to light, and several participants, including Till's mother, Mamie Till Mobley, have published autobiographies. Using this new evidence and a broadened historical context, Elliott J. Gorn delves into facets of the case never before studied and considers how and why the story of Emmett Till still resonates, and likely always will. Even as it marked a turning point, Gorn shows, hauntingly, it reveals how old patterns of thought and behavior linger in new faces, and how deeply embedded racism in America remains. Gorn does full justice to both Emmett and the Till Case--the boy and the symbol--and shows how and why their intersection illuminates a number of crossroads: of north and south, black and white, city and country, industrialization and agriculture, rich and poor, childhood and adulthood. This is the best book ever written on Emmett Till.

In an era that witnessed the rise of celebrity outlaws like Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger was the most famous and flamboyant of them all. Reports on the man and his misdeeds--spiced with accounts of his swashbuckling bravado and cool daring--provided an America worn down by the Great Depression with a salacious mix of sex and violence that proved irresistible. In Dillinger's Wild Ride, Elliott J. Gorn provides a riveting account of the year between 1933 and 1934, when the Dillinger gang pulled over a dozen bank jobs and stole hundreds of thousands of dollars. A dozen men--police, FBI agents, gangsters, and civilians--lost their lives in the rampage, and American newspapers breathlessly followed every shooting and jail-break. As Dillinger's wild year unfolded, the tale grew larger and larger in newspapers and newsreels, and even today, Dillinger is the subject of pulp literature, serious poetry and fiction, and film. What is the power of his story? Why has it lingered so long? Who was John Dillinger? Gorn illuminates the significance of Dillinger's tremendous fame and the endurance of his legacy, arguing that he represented an American fascination with primitive freedom against social convention. Dillinger's story has much to tell us about our enduring fascination with outlaws, crime and violence, about the complexity of our transition from rural to urban life, and about the transformation of America during the Great Depression.

For years recognized as the world's best-known athlete, Muhammad Ali played a fascinating role in American culture, with an influence that reached far beyond sports and, in many ways, defined his times. Ali the boxer stood side by side with Ali the vocal Black Muslim, Ali the cultural force, Ali the anti-war protestor, Ali the celebrity, Ali the narcissist, and more. In Muhammad Ali, the People's Champ, experts unpack Ali's various incarnations to build a vivid portrait of an iconic figure in the ring of public history and reveal how he touched people's lives in ways unprecedented by any sports figure before or since.

Chicago teams have won the World Series, Super Bowl, multiple Stanley Cups, and a string of National Basketball Association titles. But amateur sports also play a large role in the city's athletic traditions, especially in schools and youth leagues that allow people from across the city to add to Chicago sports history. In Sports and Chicago, an all-star roster of experts focuses on multiple aspects of Chicago sports, including long looks at amateur boxing, the impact of gender and ethnicity in sports, the politics of horse racing and stadium building, the lasting scandal of the Black Sox, and the once-perpetual heartbreak of the Cubs. Illustrated with forty photographs, the collection encourages historians and sports fans alike to appreciate the long-standing importance of sports in the Windy City. Contributors: Peter Alter, Robin F. Bachin, Larry Bennett, Linda J. Borish, Gerald Gems, Elliott J. Gorn, Richard Kimball, Gabe Logan, Daniel A. Nathan, Timothy Neary, Steven A. Riess, John Russick, Timothy Spears, Costas Spirou, and LoÏc Wacquant.

Elliott J. Gorn and Warren Goldstein show us where our games and pastimes came from, how they developed, and what they have meant to Americans. The great heroes of baseball and football are here, as well as the dramatic moments of boxing and basketball. Beyond this, the authors show us how sports fit into the larger contours of our past.  For this new edition, the authors have updated the book to include discussion of performance-enhancing drugs; player salaries, unions, and the business of internationalizing sport; Title IX and gender in American sports; race, especially the entry of Latino and Asian athletes; and the corporatization of amateur athletics. A Brief History of American Sports reveals that from colonial times to the present, sports have been central to American culture, and a profound expression of who we are.

"It didn't occur to me until fairly late in the work that I was writing a book about the beginnings of a national celebrity culture. By 1860, a few boxers had become heroes to working-class men, and big fights drew considerable newspaper coverage, most of it quite negative since the whole enterprise was illegal. But a generation later, toward the end of the century, the great John L. Sullivan of Boston had become the nation's first true sports celebrity, an American icon. The likes of poet Vachel Lindsay and novelist Theodore Dreiser lionized him—Dreiser called him 'a sort of prize fighting J. P. Morgan'—and Ernest Thompson Seton, founder of the Boy Scouts, noted approvingly that he never met a lad who would not rather be Sullivan than Leo Tolstoy."—from the AfterwordPraise for the first edition—"Gorn is an adventurous historian with a talent for informed speculation. He has written an exciting narrative history of boxing and then gone a step further to ask a series of questions that extend his focus to the whole of nineteenth-century American culture."—The Nation"Gorn combines colorful, witty, powerful narrative with enormously sophisticated analytical rigor, and the result is a book that anyone remotely interested in America's nineteenth century should read."—Virginia Quarterly Review"Gorn's finely conceived and craftsmanlike book catches the spirit of a young nation rushing to industrialization and how prize fighting was affected by, and came to reflect, much of the national mood and character. The Manly Art is first-rate social history rendered in felicitous prose."—Chicago Sun-Times"The Manly Art is an important contribution to the study of nineteenth-century American culture. Writing with clarity, vigor, and grace, Gorn combines detailed narrative with convincing interpretations. He offers the reader a judicious selection of quotations from the sporting press that capture the drama, sensuality, and brutality of the ring and its craftsmen."—The Journal of American History Elliott J. Gorn's The Manly Art tells the story of boxing's origins and the sport's place in American culture. When first published in 1986, the book helped shape the ways historians write about American sport and culture, expanding scholarly boundaries by exploring masculinity as an historical subject and by suggesting that social categories like gender, class, and ethnicity can be understood only in relation to each other. This updated edition of Gorn's highly influential history of the early prize rings features a new afterword, the author's meditation on the ways in which studies of sport, gender, and popular culture have changed in the quarter century since the book was first published. An up-to-date bibliography ensures that The Manly Art will remain a vital resource for a new generation.