An Interactive Biography of John Dillinger (Enhanced Edition)

Includes FBI videos about the manhunt for Dillinger
Includes an interview of a man taken hostage by Dillinger.
Includes a newsreel reporting Dillinger's death.
Includes pictures.

"I will be the meanest bastard you ever saw when I get out of here." – John Dillinger

Everyone has read about history’s most important people and events in dense textbooks and classrooms, but words can only say so much. In Charles River Editors’ Interactive Biography series, history comes to life in video and audio, allowing people to not only read history but truly experience it, through the eyes and ears of the people who were there.

Two months after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933, a petty thief who had spent almost a decade behind bars for attempted theft and aggravated assault was released from jail. By the end of the year, that man, John Dillinger, would be America’s most famous outlaw: Public Enemy Number One. From the time of his first documented heist in early July 1933, until his dramatic death in late July of the following year, he would capture the nation’s attention and imagination as had no other outlaw since Jesse James.

His exploits were real, and in many cases impressive, but Dillinger’s importance and legacy have always been partly symbolic. The country was in a panic over a supposed crime wave that some historians believe was more perception than reality, but a new breed of criminal targeting the nation’s already vulnerable banks was a potent illustration and metaphor of the way society’s institutions and morals seemed to be coming undone. And in the mind of the public, the outlaws of the 30s were very different from the gangsters of the 20s; they hailed from the farm country of America’s nostalgic past, not the corrupt cities of its unsettled present and scarier future. Much was made of Dillinger’s roots in the farming town of Mooresville, Indiana, even though he came of age in Indianapolis, and was very much a city boy at heart.

Even still, Dillinger would never have become the mythical figure he became if J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI hadn’t actively marketed him as “Public Enemy Number One,” and if he hadn’t died in a way that was almost scripted for Hollywood. Dillinger’s figure looms so large in American history and popular culture that it’s easy to forget that his starring role in the daily news lasted for less than a year.

An Interactive Biography of John Dillinger looks at the life and crime of the famous outlaw, but it also humanizes him and analyzes his lasting legacy. Along with video of Dillinger and the manhunt for him, as well as pictures of Dillinger and important people, places, and events in his life, you will learn about the infamous public enemy like you never have before, in no time at all.