The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The man whom Ratliff, facetiously, refers to as "our own Bilbo in Mississippi" was a racist and an outspoken supporter of the Jim Crow system of segregation. He was elected twice as Governor of Mississippi and later three times as a U.S. Senator (179). Two rural white characters in Yoknapatawpha (Bilbo Snopes and Bilbo Gowrie) were named after him.

Populist Governor of Louisiana and later a U.S. Senator. Although the narrative seems to assume he is still alive in the 1940s, he was assassinated in the mid-1930s.

Like the Ku Klux Klan, the next organization that Clarence Snopes joins - "the Silver Shirts" - was a real historical group. The real Silver Shirts was short-lived, but at one point during the Depression it was a very popular American Fascist political organization formed and led by William Dudley Pelley.

White Supremacist organization founded after the Civil War in order to terrorize and subjugate African-Americans and, in time, other minorities, especially "Catholics and Jews" (333). Clarence Snopes joins the KKK "when it appeared in the county" (330), but campaigns against it soon afterward in his first election sometime around 1920, and according to the narrative "did indeed destroy the Ku Klux Klan in Yoknapatawpha" at that time (333).

Joseph Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union from 1924 until 1953. "Hitler's and Stalin's pact" - mentioned in The Mansion - was the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and Russia that the two men signed in 1939 (two years before Germany invaded Russia in World War II).

First mentioned in the novel as "that one in Spain" on a list that includes "Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany" (183), included by name on the later "Hitler and Mussolini and Franco" (214), General Francisco Franco led the Fascist side in the Spanish Civil War, coming to power afterward as the country's right-wing dictator. He remained in power until the 1970s.

Leader of Italy's National Fascist Party and the country's Prime Minister from 1922-43, during which time he took his country into World War II as an ally of Nazi Germany.

Hitler was the infamous leader of Nazi Germany from 1933 until his death in 1945 at the end of World War II. Gavin calls him "the Nibelung maniac" (258).

The 28th President of the U.S., Woodrow Wilson declared war on Germany on April 2, 1917; this is "the President's declaration" mentioned in the novel (204). In the aftermath of World War I, Wilson was one of the key promoters of the League of Nations.

The original "V.K." from whom the narrative's V.K. Ratliff gets his first two names (but not his last one; as Ratliff tells Gavin, "we dont know what his last name was," 180). He came to the new world during the Revolutionary War, to fight for the British as "a mercenary Hessian soldier" (198), though as a Russian he "maybe couldn't even speak German, let alone American" (198). He was captured after General Burgoyne's defeat at Saratoga and sent to Virginia as a prisoner of war; after six years he escaped and was shelted by a farm girl named Ratcliffe, whom he married.