Skinheads Shaved for Battle ― A Cultural History of American Skinheads

Skinheads Shaved for Battle investigates the world of young American men and women - sometimes boys and girls - who helped form the most significant and violent new hate group of the 1980s. Bound together far more by common beliefs and attitudes than by structural links, racist skinheads (non-racist skinheads also exist) developed during the decade from a greatly splintered and marginal presence on the punk scene to become a highly explosive, dominating force praised and courted by the country's older, more established right wing extremist organizations.
Now an international phenomenon, skinheads were first sighted in England as another in a series of youthful counter-cultural movements and viewed sometimes sympathetically for rejecting the dead end life held out to young working class people in a shoddy welfare state. The skinhead scene ballooned in the late 1960s and then withered. In the mid 1970s it re-formed, growing in the shadow of the punk scene, only this time with a more clearly political agenda directed against minorities and homosexuals.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has termed skinheads "a unique and frightening phenomenon...initiated by teenagers," unconfined "to any single geographic region," a group "whose gangs sprang up spontaneously." The Anti-Defamation League demonstrated in publication after publication why neo-Nazi skinheads were not simply a "menacing presence" in America but one of the greatest threats to civil rights in the nation.
Skinheads Shaved for Battle investigates the English roots of skinhead style; the American variant's development within larger youth group scenes; the ideas and activities of racist skinheads; their modes of organization; the role of music in their formation; their presentation in the media; and the damage they have done in American society. Buttressing his standard library research with study in Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League archives and first-hand interviews, Jack B. Moore emphasizes throughout the American identity of skinheadism.

Jack B. Moore teaches American Literature, American Studies, and Humanities at the University of South Floria.