Looking at the narrative accounts of mob violence produced by vigilantes and/or their advocates as "official" histories, Lisa Arellano shows how these non-fiction narratives conform to a common formula whose purpose is to legitimate frontier justice and lynching. In Vigilantes and Lynch Mobs, Arellano closely examines such narratives as well as the work of western historian and archivist Hubert Howe Bancroft, who was sympathetic to them and that of Ida B. Wells, who wrote in fierce opposition to lynching. Tracing the creation, maintenance, and circulation of dominant, alternative, and...

Vigilantes and lynch mobs not only usurped the authority of the law, they shaped the histories of their actions

A special issue of Radical History Review In bringing together a geographically and temporally broad range of interdisciplinary historical scholarship, this issue of Radical History Review offers an expansive examination of gender, violence, and the state. Through analyses of New York penitentiaries, anarchists in early twentieth-century Japan, and militarism in the 1990s, contributors reconsider how historical conceptions of masculinity and femininity inform the persistence of and punishments for gendered violence. The contributors to a section on violence and activism...