"Even as the United States was experiencing the first stirrings of labor-related violence in the 1860s, an even greater source of terror – white supremacy – was emerging from the ashes of the American Civil War. What followed was an unprecedented wave of American domestic terrorism primarily carried out by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and directed against former slaves and their allies. While Russian populists lay claim to being the first to extensively develop the justification, strategic vision, and conspiratorial methods of modern terrorism, American white supremacists were the first to mount a massive – although decentralized and rarely self-conscious – campaign of terrorist violence."