...[T]he purpose of [Christopher Waldrep's new book] is "to trace the history of the word lynching, as a variable in determining Americans' acceptance of extralegal violence" (4).

In the process, he presents both a sweeping account of the behaviors described as "lynching" and a careful analysis of the relationship between those behaviors, the language used to describe them, and shifts in American mores. It is an ambitious project, but Waldrep carries it off convincingly, producing an account that explains the evolution of extralegal violence in America and provokes scholars of lynching to think more carefully about just what it is they study....

Waldrep puts various forms of extralegal violence in American history into a broad framework and shows how one led to another. Too often histories of lynch­ing have given but cursory attention to the relationship between extralegal violence in the West and in the South. Waldrep's distinction between Reconstruction-era violence and the classic formulas of lynching developed in the 1870s and 1880s reveals an important point. While some earlier studies have shown that there were remarkable continuities in these periods in terms of the victims of violence (mostly African American), Waldrep provides a convincing explanation of why most people at the time did not see these forms of violence as similar. It is just this sort of fine distinction that Waldrep excels at, refining the way we think about the prac­tice of lynching based on the way contemporary observers tactically deployed the language available to them to support or attack the extralegal violence itself.

Bruce E. Baker
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Law and History Review 22 (2004): 664-666.