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Carrigan
and Waldrep take on the challenging task of placing lynching in a world history
perspective through a collection of essays. The works examine lynching in
a multi-dimensional context from the world-wide use of the word itself to
the American behavior pattern which coined the term, and they explore foreign
use of the term to create an image of the United States. Collectively the
essays make it clear that lynching is an Americanism that has found its way in
some form into multiple world languages with varying degrees of having the same
historical connotations as in the United States. As for the behavior itself,
terms derived globally from lynching have been applied to many forms of informal
justice and extralegal collective violence to the degree that the behavior
identified by the term appears cross-cultural. Such a recognition, the editors
carefully point out, is not intended to justify lynching as mere human behavior,
but rather is designed to point out the wide reach of the American
term. The final articles explore topics such as how lynching shaped
British opinion about the United States and how propagandists in Japan during
World War II and their Soviet counterparts during the Cold War employed
lynching against the United States.
The
work's breath extends from the ancient Near East to modern Northern Ireland,
from French witchcraft trials to the American Wild West, and it does so while maintaining
a core unifying set of themes that are laid out well in the introduction. It
raises some interesting questions about American exceptionalism and provides an
original context in which to examine the usefulness of that concept. Why have
other cultures expropriated the American term to describe aspects of
behavior in their own societies even though those behaviors sometimes
have only surface similarities to the American reality? That question is not
answered, but valuable works ask good questions.
Tom
Williams is Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Green Mountain
College. He can be reached at williamst@greenmtn.edu. |
