BOOK REVIEWS Lynching Beyond Dixie: American Mob Violence Outside the South. Edited by Michael J. Pfeifer. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013. 336 pp. Paper, $28.00.)
AMERICANS’ ALL-TOO-FREQUENT RESORT to “lynch law” to execute alleged (and actual) criminals as well as other perceived troublemakers is one of the black eyes on this nation’s history. Understandably, the vast majority of scholarship on lynching and other race-based forms of violence focuses on the American South. Michael Pfeifer’s edited collection of essays, Lynching Beyond Dixie, admirably fulfills its title’s promise in extending our gaze beyond the former Confederacy to recognize “rough justice” as a national—not simply a regional—phenomenon. The volume’s ten essays (plus an excellent editor’s introduction) take the reader on a tour of the United States, with half of the chapters focusing on “the West” (primarily Texas, Arizona, California, Kansas, and Utah), three on the Midwest, and two on the Northeast. The collection’s novelty is somewhat diminished by the fact that four of the ten essays have been published previously, but the convenience of having them all in one place justifies the book’s utility and contribution. One of the book’s truly outstanding features is a table charting all the known lynchings that took place outside the South in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, grouped by state but also including information about the locality, date, names of victims, race, alleged offense, method of killing, and sources. That the table is nearly sixty pages long, in small print, is itself a sobering testimony to the human toll of just this small slice of American violence. As is common in the literature, the authors cannot agree on what constitutes a lynching. Helen McLure stretches the definition to include a wide range of lethal hostilities between whites and Indians, as well as other cases that I would classify as murder, frontier violence, or mass violence. Without a precise definition, too many dissimilar types of violence are all included inside one term, thus diminishing its analytical utility. Even more questionable is Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua’s reference to “academic lynching” (166), in which scholars pay more attention analyzing white perpetrators than black victims—a critique-worthy imbalance, to be sure, but does it really constitute a contemporary act of lynching remotely akin to the original lethal act? All of the authors should be congratulated for their outstanding and careful primary source research. In many ways, the host of local nineteenthand early twentieth-century newspapers are the star witnesses here, as they represent the only known documentation for many of these lynchings. As for the individual essays, I can mention only a few highlights. Christopher Waldrep’s essay on the tension between politics and law in 1850s San Francisco—site of the largest vigilante movement in U.S. history—insightfully demonstrates how Americans came to exalt majoritarian politics over
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