Description: Eighty-five years after the murder of Mary Phagan and the subsequent trial and lynching of the accused killer, a Jewish factory manager from the North, The Leo Frank Case remains the major account of the event that prompted B'nai B'rith to found the Anti-Defamation League. In April 1913, thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan was found brutally murdered in the basement of the Atlanta pencil factory where she worked. Leo Frank, the factory manager, was arrested and accused of her murder. After two years of trials highlighted by sensational newspaper coverage, popular hysteria, and legal demagoguery, Frank was sentenced to death despite inconclusive evidence of his guilt. Although the governor of Georgia commuted his sentence, a mob kidnapped and lynched Frank near Phagan's hometown. In this classic study of one of the most infamous outbursts of anti-Semitism in the United States, Leonard Dinnerstein not only tells the compelling stories of Phagan's and Frank's deaths, he also places Frank's trial and lynching in the context of a rapidly changing southern society.

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