Sentence:  Earlier scholarship tried to maintain a distinction between the violence of the Ku Klux Klan and the ostensibly peaceful activities of the <WSD>Red Shirts</WSD>, but more recent scholarship has concluded that this was a distinction without a difference. 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  A member of a paramilitary arm of the Democratic party in Mississippi and South Carolina at the end of Reconstruction.