Violence forms a constant backdrop to American history, from the revolutionary overthrow of British rule, to the struggle for civil rights, to the present-day debates over the death penalty. It has served to challenge authority, defend privilege, advance causes, and throttle hopes. In the first anthology of its kind to appear in over thirty years, Documenting American Violence brings together excerpts from a wide range of sources about incidents of violence in the United States. Each document is set into context, allowing readers to see the event through the viewpoint of...
Violence forms a constant backdrop to American history, from the revolutionary overthrow of British rule, to the struggle for civil rights, to the pre...
Every white southerner understood what keeping African Americans down meant and what it did not mean. It did not mean going to court; it did not mean relying on the law. It meant vigilante violence and lynching.Looking at Vicksburg, Mississippi, Roots of Disorder traces the origins of these terrible attitudes to the day-to-day operations of local courts. In Vicksburg, white exploitation of black labor through slavery evolved into efforts to use the law to define blacks' place in society, setting the stage for widespread tolerance of brutal vigilantism. Fed by racism and economics, whites'...
Every white southerner understood what keeping African Americans down meant and what it did not mean. It did not mean going to court; it did not mean ...
The U.S. is the most violent industrialized country in the world, and lynching - that is, murder endorsed by the community - may be a key to understanding America's heritage of violence and perhaps point to solutions that can eradicate it. While lynchings are predominantly racial in tone and motive, Christopher Waldrep's sweeping study of the meaning and uses of lynching from the colonial period to the present reveals that the definition of the term has shifted dramatically over time, and that the victims and perpetuators of lynching were as diverse as its many meanings. By examining lynching...
The U.S. is the most violent industrialized country in the world, and lynching - that is, murder endorsed by the community - may be a key to understan...
During the hottest days of the summer of 1863, while the nation's attention was focused on a small town in Pennsylvania known as Gettysburg, another momentous battle was being fought along the banks of the Mississippi. In the longest single campaign of the war, the siege of Vicksburg left 19,000 dead and wounded on both sides, gave the Union Army control of the Mississippi, and left the Confederacy cut in half. In this highly-anticipated new work, Christopher Waldrep takes a fresh look at how the Vicksburg campaign was fought and remembered. He begins with a gripping account of the battle,...
During the hottest days of the summer of 1863, while the nation's attention was focused on a small town in Pennsylvania known as Gettysburg, another m...
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...
Whether conveyed through newspapers, photographs, or Billie Holliday's haunting song -Strange Fruit, - lynching has immediate and graphic connotati...
Much of the current reassessment of race, culture, and criminal justice in the nineteenth-century South has been based on intensive community studies. Drawing on previously untapped sources, the nine original papers collected here represent some of the best new work on how racial justice can be shaped by the particulars of time and place.
Although each essay is anchored in the local, several important larger themes emerge across the volume--such as the importance of personality and place, the movement of former slaves from the capriciousness of "plantation justice" to the (theoretically)...
Much of the current reassessment of race, culture, and criminal justice in the nineteenth-century South has been based on intensive community studi...
In the late nineteenth century, industrialization was making its way into rural America. In an agricultural region of Kentucky and Tennessee called the Black Patch for the dark tobacco grown there, big business arrived with a vengeance, eliminating competition, manipulating prices, and undermining local control. The farmers fought back. "Night Riders" tells the story of the struggle that followed, and reveals the ambiguities and complexities of a drama that convulsed this community for over two decades. Christopher Waldrep shows that, contrary to many accounts, these wealthy tobacco...
In the late nineteenth century, industrialization was making its way into rural America. In an agricultural region of Kentucky and Tennessee called th...
In the late nineteenth century, industrialization was making its way into rural America. In an agricultural region of Kentucky and Tennessee called the Black Patch for the dark tobacco grown there, big business arrived with a vengeance, eliminating competition, manipulating prices, and undermining local control. The farmers fought back. "Night Riders" tells the story of the struggle that followed, and reveals the ambiguities and complexities of a drama that convulsed this community for over two decades. Christopher Waldrep shows that, contrary to many accounts, these wealthy tobacco...
In the late nineteenth century, industrialization was making its way into rural America. In an agricultural region of Kentucky and Tennessee called th...
This book examines African Americans' strategies for resisting white racial violence from the Civil War until the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968 and up to the Clinton era. Christopher Waldrep's semi-biographical approach to the pioneers in the anti-lynching campaign portrays African Americans as active participants in the effort to end racial violence rather than as passive victims. In telling this more than 100-year-old story of violence and resistance, Waldrep describes how white Americans legitimized racial violence after the Civil War, and how black journalists...
This book examines African Americans' strategies for resisting white racial violence from the Civil War until the assassination of Martin Luther King,...
In 1906 a white lawyer named Dabney Marshall argued a case before the Mississippi Supreme Court demanding the racial integration of juries. He carried out a plan devised by Mississippi's foremost black lawyer of the time: Willis Mollison. Against staggering odds, and with the help of a friendly newspaper editor, he won. How Marshall and his allies were able to force the court to overturn state law and precedent, if only for a brief period, at the behest of the U.S. Supreme Court is the subject of "Jury Discrimination," a book that explores the impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on...
In 1906 a white lawyer named Dabney Marshall argued a case before the Mississippi Supreme Court demanding the racial integration of juries. He carr...
