The Nineties in America - Salem Press (2009)

Congressional District seat, receiving 20 percent of
the vote and finishing third. In that same year, he
publishedMy Awakening, an autobiographical work
that reaffirmed his racist and anti-Semitic beliefs. At
the end of the decade, Duke was being investigated
by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for mail
fraud and tax evasion based on his political activities.
He eventually pleaded guilty to these charges and
was imprisoned for thirteen months in 2003 and
2004.

Impact In his numerous political campaigns in the
1990’s, Duke portrayed himself as a changed person
who no longer held the views that were part of his ex-
tremist past. This attempt to mainstream his mes-
sage was successful to a degree; however, he was
never able to win another political race following
his election to the Louisiana House of Representa-
tives. Nevertheless, his ability to attract a large per-
centage of white voters illustrated that extremists

can appeal to race and class resentment by modify-

ing their message.

Further Reading

Bridges, Tyler.The Rise of David Duke. Jackson: Uni-

versity Press of Mississippi, 1994.

Kuzenski, John C., Charles S. Bullock III, and Ron-

ald Keith Gaddie, eds.David Duke and the Politics of

Race in the South. Nashville: Vanderbilt University

Press, 1995.

Powell, Lawrence N.Troubled Memor y: Anne Levy, the

Holocaust, and David Duke’s Louisiana. Chapel

Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

William V. Moore

See also African Americans; Hate crimes; Holo-

caust Memorial Museum; Illegal immigration; Jew-

ish Americans; Latinos; Race relations.

 DVDs

Definition An optical disc storage format

primarily used by consumers to watch films and

television programs

DVDs arrived in the mid-1990’s and soon challenged the

supremacy of videocassettes for home viewing.

In the 1970’s and 1980’s, the Video Home System

(VHS) videocassette recorder (VCR) revolutionized

home entertainment by allowing viewers to video-

tape television programs and watch them at their lei-

sure and to rent or buy films on videotape. This view-

ing flexibility was undercut for some because the

picture and sound quality of videocassettes was gen-

erally inferior to what could be seen and heard on

television and especially in movie theaters. Then,

digital video discs (DVDs) were developed to offer

viewers considerably improved picture and sound.

Format Development Two years after its introduc-

tion in 1976, VHS had a challenger in the laser disc,

which offered much sharper images, offering 425

lines of horizontal resolution in contrast to VHS’s

240. With Criterion’s special edition release ofCiti-
     zen Kane(1941) in 1985, which provided supplemen-
     tal material about the film (generally referred to as
     bonus materials, or extras), another advantage was
     introduced. Laser discs never caught on with the
     public, however, because of their cumbersome size
     (comparable to long-playing records), their suscep-

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DVDs The Nineties in America

David Duke in 1991. (AP/Wide World Photos)