Kevin Boyle, William Smith Mason Professor of American History at Northwestern, has been published in The Atlantic. Boyle’s op-ed, How Relatives Can Make Radicals, explores the influence of family members on radical extremism.
“The conventional wisdom about radicalization is that ideas attract people to extremist movements and to the violence those movements commit,” Boyle writes. “Very often, what differentiates those who commit overt violence is their personal ties to others in the movement. Because although extremist movements are ideological, extremist violence turns out to be strikingly social.”
Boyle (Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1990) is a historian of the twentieth-century United States, with a particular interest in modern American social movements. He is currently at work on The Splendid Dead, a micro-history of political extremism and repression in the early twentieth century.
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