Lynching in America: A History in Documents

Portada
Christopher Waldrep
NYU Press, 2006 M01 1 - 281 páginas

Whether conveyed through newspapers, photographs, or Billie Holliday’s haunting song “Strange Fruit,” lynching has immediate and graphic connotations for all who hear the word. Images of lynching are generally unambiguous: black victims hanging from trees, often surrounded by gawking white mobs. While this picture of lynching tells a distressingly familiar story about mob violence in America, it is not the full story. Lynching in America presents the most comprehensive portrait of lynching to date, demonstrating that while lynching has always been present in American society, it has been anything but one-dimensional.

Ranging from personal correspondence to courtroom transcripts to journalistic accounts, Christopher Waldrep has extensively mined an enormous quantity of documents about lynching, which he arranges chronologically with concise introductions. He reveals that lynching has been part of American history since the Revolution, but its victims, perpetrators, causes, and environments have changed over time. From the American Revolution to the expansion of the western frontier, Waldrep shows how communities defended lynching as a way to maintain law and order. Slavery, the Civil War, and especially Reconstruction marked the ascendancy of racialized lynching in the nineteenth century, which has continued to the present day, with the murder of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s contention that he was lynched by Congress at his confirmation hearings.

Since its founding, lynching has permeated American social, political, and cultural life, and no other book documents American lynching with historical texts offering firsthand accounts of lynchings, explanations, excuses, and criticism.

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Contenido

Explanations
1
1 The First Lynchers
26
2 Jacksonian America
41
3 Slavery
61
4 How the West Was Won
81
5 Civil War and Reconstruction
95
Schall the Wheel of Race Agitation Be Stopped?
115
7 State Sovereignty and Mob Law
134
8 Western Lynching in an Industrializing Age
160
9 The Limits of Progressive Reform
183
10 Federal Law against Mob Law
207
11 The New Deal
229
12 HighTech Lynchings
249
Index
271
About the Editor
281
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Christopher Waldrep is Jamie and Phyllis Pasker Professor of History, San Francisco State University. He is the author of Night Riders: Defending Community in the Black Patch: 1890-1915, Roots of Disorder: Race and Criminal Justice in the American South, 1817-1880, and The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America.

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