Lynching in the United States: An Encyclopedia

With a breadth greater than any previously published work, this reference volume explores the history of lynching in the United States. Ninety-three chapters authored by expert scholars document the more than 3,446 African Americans, 1,297 White Americans, and 597 Mexican Americans who were lynched in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries around the different regions of the United States, as well as the responses and strategies for combating these brutal crimes. Further chapters discuss the lynchings of women, Chinese Americans, foreign nationals, and Italian Americans, as well as the relationship between lynching and phenomena such as religion, ritual, and the death penalty, and the relation between US lynching and collective violence around the world. Cultural production surrounding lynching--photographs, plays, films, novels, poetry, and language and rhetoric--is also considered. The volume includes a comprehensive bibliography of American lynching.