San Antonio College Library

In this boldly interpretive narrative, the author tells the story of America's paradox of democracy entangled with a centuries old system of racial oppression. Before English colonization, Spanish and Portuguese conquerors enslaved American natives to produce for a European market. They saw their slaves become addicted to sugar, rum, and tobacco, and sicken and die in apocalyptic numbers. They began to import Africans, who survived the killer plantation...

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.

Nevels argues that five racially motivated murders of black men in Brazos County, Texas, point to an emerging social phenomenon of the time: the desire of newly arrived European immigrants to assert their place in society and the use of racial violence to achieve that end.