This incisive study takes on one of the grimmest secrets in America's national life--the history of lynching and, more generally, the public punishment of African Americans. Jacqueline Goldsby shows that lynching cannot be explained away as a phenomenon peculiar to the South or as the perverse culmination of racist politics. Rather, lynching--a highly visible form of social violence that has historically been shrouded in secrecy--was in fact a fundamental...