The roots of rough justice
Subtitle: origins of American lynching
By: Michael J. Pfeifer
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Urbana
Language: eng
Number of pages: 143
ISBN-13: 9780252036132
Subjects: Lynching; Culture conflict; Capital punishment; Social control; History; Discrimination in capital punishment
Description: 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 of ideas and practices of social ordering, law, and collective violence in the American colonies, the early American Republic, and especially the decades before and immediately after the American Civil War. Pfeifer also analyzes the history of American lynching in a global context, from the early modern British Atlantic to the legal status of collective violence in contemporary Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Arguing that the origins of lynching cannot be restricted to any particular region he shows how the national and transatlantic context is essential for understanding how whites used mob violence to enforce the racial and class hierarchies across the United States. --From publisher description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Collective violence in the British Atlantic; title: Vigilantes, criminal justice, and Antebellum cultural conflict; title: Racial and class frontiers: lynching and social identity in Antebellum America; title: Lynchers versus due process: the forging of rough justice; title: The Civil War and reconstruction and the remaking of American lynching; title: Epilogue.