New Books In World Affairs

It takes a brave historian to take on the orthodoxy regarding the rise and fall of lynching in the United States. That orthodoxy holds that lynching in the South was a ‘system of social control’ in which whites used organized terror to oppress blacks. You can find this thesis in numerous monographs, textbooks, and in the popular press. It’s one of those things “everybody knows.” But according to Robert Thurston’s provocative new book Lynching: American Mob Murder in Global Perspective (Ashgate, 2011) the standard ‘social control’ line is inadequate. It cannot explain when lynching started or when it ended; why lynching occurred in some places often and others never; and why the period in question witnessed a considerable amount of intra-racial lynching. The ‘social control’ thesis fails because it tries to put a square peg (the evidence) in a round hole (the concept of systematic oppression through terror). Thurston shows that lynching, though hardly accidental, was simply too occasional and too random to b