San Antonio College Library

Lynching has often been called "America's national crime" that has defined the tradition of extralegal violence in America. Having claimed many thousand victims, "Judge Lynch" holds a firm place in the dark recesses of our national memory. In this book the author explores the history of lynching from the colonial era to the present. American lynch law, he argues, has rested on three pillars: the frontier experience, racism, and the anti-authoritarian...

Nearly 5,000 black Americans were lynched between 1890 and 1960, and as Sherrilyn Ifill argues, the effects of this racial trauma continue to resound. While the lynchings were devastating, the little-known contemporary consequences, such as the marginalization of political and economic development for blacks, are equally pernicious. Ifill traces the lingering effects of two lynchings in Maryland to illustrate how ubiquitous this history is, and issues...

Beyond the Rope is an interdisciplinary study that draws on narrative theory and cultural studies methodologies to trace African Americans' changing attitudes and relationships to lynching over the twentieth century. Whereas African Americans are typically framed as victims of white lynch mob violence in both scholarly and public discourses, Karlos K. Hill reveals that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries African Americans lynched...

"The hangman's knot is a simple thing to tie, just a rope carefully coiled around itself up to thirteen times. But in those thirteen turns lie a powerful symbol, one of the most powerful in history, and particularly in America, whose relationship to the noose is all too deep and complicated. Our history with hangings is shockingly recent. The last man to be hanged in the United States was Billy Bailey, who was executed in Delaware in 1996 for committing...

Analyzes the foundations of lynching in American social history, scrutinizing the vigilante movements and lynching violence that occurred in the middle decades of the nineteenth century on the Southern, Midwestern, and far Western frontiers. Pfeifer offers new insights into collective violence in the pre-Civil War era and examines the antecedents of American lynching in an early modern Anglo-European folk and legal heritage. He addresses the transformation...

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...

"Rough Justice is the first national cross-regional study of the history of lynching and criminal justice in the United States. Working from extensive research in newspapers, court records, coroner's inquests, and personal correspondence, the book ties lynching to understandings of criminal justice, strongly influenced by notions of race and gender, that varied across social classes and regions. It is dedicated to the victims of lynching and legal...

By examining lynching spectacles alongside both traditional and modern practices and within both local and national contexts, Wood reconfigures our understanding of lynching's relationship to modern life. ;from publisher description.