Strange People on the Hill: How Extremism Tore Apart a Small American Town, by Michael Edison Hayden. 320 pages. $30.00 ISBN 978-1645030607

Authors

• Thomas F. Schaller, University of Maryland, BaltimoreFollow

Document Type

Review

Abstract

Political scientist Tom Schaller reviews Michael Edison Hayden’s Strange People on the Hill: How Extremism Tore Apart a Small American Town. Part memoir and part ethnography, Strange People on the Hill details Hayden’s time as an investigative journalist in Berkley Springs, West Virginia, where the Southern Poverty Law Center tasked him with learning about the purchase of an area castle by Peter Brimelow, the founder of the white nationalist group VDARE, named after Virginia Dare, the first white child born in the Americas, and his wife. Strange People on the Hill chronicles the challenges of working as a journalist with a focus on hate groups as well as life in a politically conservative area.

Recommended Citation

Schaller, Thomas F. (2026) "Strange People on the Hill: How Extremism Tore Apart a Small American Town, by Michael Edison Hayden. 320 pages. $30.00 ISBN 978-1645030607," Journal of Hate Studies: Vol. 19: Iss. 1, Article 6.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.64749/2169-7442.1266
Available at: https://repository.gonzaga.edu/jhs/vol19/iss1/6

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.