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A popular, personal, historical take on a singular garment and its myriad associations with death, violence, and identity.

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Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
We all wear hoods: the Grim Reaper, Red Riding Hood, torturers, executioners and the executed, athletes, laborers, anarchists, rappers, babies in onesies, and anyone who´s ever grabbed a hoodie on a chilly day. Alison Kinney´s Hood explores the material and symbolic vibrancy of this everyday garment and political semaphore, which often protects the powerful at the expense of the powerless-with deadly results. Kinney considers medieval clerics and the Klan, anti-hoodie campaigns and the Hooded Man of Abu Ghraib, the Inquisition and the murder of Trayvon Martin, uncovering both the hooded perpetrators of violence and the hooded victims in their sights.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

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Chapter One: "That very, very simple thing about the hood"
The Grim Reaper. The executioner and the executed.

Chapter Two: The Struggle Against Terrorism
Two Murals. The Ku Klux Klan. Lynching. The Spanish Inquisition. A Timeline of Hooding. Abu Ghraib.

Chapter Three: Little Red Riding Hoodlum
Our bodies, our hoods. The Seattle WTO protests. Black Blocs and pink blocs.

Chapter Four: "It´s What´s Under the Hood That Counts"
Everybody´s hoods. Anti-hoodie initiatives. Black Lives Matter.

Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Notes

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Provocative and highly informative, Alison Kinney´s Hood considers this seemingly neutral garment accessory and reveals it to be vexed by a long history of violence, from the Grim Reaper to the KKK and beyond-a history we would do well to address, and redress. Readers will never see hoods the same way again. Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking

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Alison Kinney is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York, USA. She is a regular correspondent at The Paris Review Daily, and her writing also appears online at The New Yorker, Harper´s, Lapham´s Quarterly, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Longreads, Hyperallergic, L.A. Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Inquiry, New Republic, VAN Magazine, and other publications.

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