"History Written With Lightning": Religion, White Supremacy, and the Rise and Fall of Thomas Dixon, Jr.

Baptist minister and author of novels, plays, sermons, and essays, Thomas Dixon, Jr., today remains most known as the storyteller behind the 1915 D. W. Griffith Film The Birth of a Nation. I argue that Thomas Dixon crafted a white supremacist rhetoric and narrative of modern whiteness indebted to the structures of Fundamentalist Christianity. With varying degrees of success, later writers struggled with the legacy the Dixonian cultural narrative bequeathed them.