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Dissertation Title:
“'I Suppose You Think Strange the Murder of Women and Children':The
American Culture of Collective Violence, 1652-1930"
The numerous studies of U.S. lynching and mob
violence that began during the 1970s have primarily
focused on Southern white extralegal executions of black
Southern men during a relatively narrow period between
1880 and 1940. Thus, they have tended to filter out
women and children as victims, perpetrators, and
participants of many types of both lethal and non-lethal
collective action in the colonial and Revolutionary eras
and the antebellum and postbellum Midwest and West,
including Texas and Oklahoma. The capacity to engage in
extralegal violence transcended gender and age and
became widespread in American life from a very early
period. My dissertation chronicles and examines the
development of a distinctly American culture of
collective violence from its roots in the brutal
guerrilla warfare with the native people on the
frontiers of colonization and U.S. western expansion and
in European rituals such as the French charivari
and British skimmington, to the whipping assaults on
men, women, and children called whitecappings that
occurred across the country from the mid-1880s into the
1920s. Tracing the changes that occurred in the types of
mob violence that involved women and children between
the mid-seventeenth and mid-twentieth centuries also
illustrates crucial shifts in their economic, political
and social status during the period. Extralegal
collection action by and against women and juveniles
paralleled their increasing importance and power in
American society, as well as resistance and challenges
to that power.
A greater understanding of the “cultural
logic” of lynching and mob violence may also be derived
from analysis of other customs and practices derived
from European antecedents, such as popular concepts of
the body, health and disease; folk medicine and
sympathetic and religious magic; and animal folklore and
hunting rituals. The canvas of American life was crowded
with mob actions large and small, and upon closer
examination, many of the actors may appear surprising.
Racial lynching of Indian, Mexican, Chinese, black, and
mixed-race men occurred with great regularity in the
West. On occasion, mob assaults occurred within African
American, Native American, and Latino communities, or
across all lines of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and
age. Such episodes demonstrate how deeply embedded
collective violence was in the structure of U.S. society
and culture, as members of many of the nation’s
different races and ethnicities used a variety of forms
of mob action to punish offenders and to mediate power
relations both inside and outside their groups. These
nineteenth and twentieth-century crowd attacks
constituted a “vocabulary of collective violence” that
could be understood and deployed across multiple
locations and levels of American society from the
earliest days of Anglo-European settlement to the late
twentieth century, and, perhaps, beyond.
[Updated 6/2012) |
