The Ku Klux Klan at Home in Hillsdale

In “The Ku Klux Klan at Home in Hillsdale,” author Aífe Murray travels to Bergen County to reckon with a dramatic set of events that occurred during her father’s Hillsdale youth when his family was attacked by the Second Ku Klux Klan; long-held by historians as this country’s most powerful far right movement. Through the author’s quest (including interviews with her father’s contemporaries on both sides of the Klan equation), she uncovers a Klan story that, in artifacts and acts, has been preserved within a larger, more common frame of America’s failure to come to terms with what occurred in the early 20th century. Within the long shadow of all-American terrorism, a tale is revealed of shifting power in the Pascack Valley with a local KKK populated by community leaders fearing changes that included Catholic encroachment. After the Klan’s demise, some victims, refusing to forget, kept the story alive while living beside their former terrorizers. The author notes that a mass movement of millions of otherwise ordinary white Protestants should be remembered not only for its legacy of terror (with which Americans continue to wrestle) but for how their fires forged an unintended consequence: subsequent storytellers, historians, and resistors like her father who made a life of civil rights activism.

Bergen County Academies: A Model for Graduate-Level Research and Technology in a High School Setting

Extended abstract of a paper presented at Microscopy and Microanalysis 2011 in Nashville, Tennessee, USA, August 7–August 11, 2011.

Augmenting Secondary Education with Advanced Microscopy

In his 2011 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama echoed the sentiments of this nation's leaders for the past twenty years when he stated, “Nations like China and India realized…they could compete in this new world. So they started educating their children earlier and longer, with greater emphasis on math and science. They're investing in research and new technologies…. Maintaining our leadership in research and technology is crucial to America's success. But if we want to win the future—if we want innovation to produce jobs in America and not overseas—then we also have to win the race to educate our kids.” The Bergen County Academies (BCA) in Hackensack, NJ, is attempting to do just that: invest in research and technology at the high school level in order to expose students to real world opportunities and applications they will experience in the future.