Violence forms a constant backdrop to American history, from the revolutionary overthrow of British rule, to the struggle for civil rights, to the present-day debates over the death penalty. It has served to challenge authority, defend privilege, advance causes, and throttle hopes. In the first anthology of its kind to appear in over thirty years, Documenting American Violence brings together excerpts from a wide range of sources about incidents of violence in the United States. Each document is set into context, allowing readers to see the event through the viewpoint of contemporary participants and witnesses and to understand how these deeds have been excused, condemned, or vilified by society. Organized topically, this volume looks at such diverse topics as famous crimes, vigilantism, industrial violence, domestic abuse, and state-sanctioned violence. Among the events these primary sources describe are: --Benjamin Franklin's account of the Conestoga massacre, when an entire village of American Indians was killed by the Paxton Boys, a group of frontier settlers --militant abolitionist John Brown's attack on Harper's Ferry --Ida B. Wells' condemnation of lynchings in the South --the massacre of General Custer's 7th Cavalry at Little Bighorn, as witnessed by Cheyenne war chief Two Moon --Nat Turner's confession about the slave revolt he led in Southampton County, Virginia --Oliver Wendell Holmes' diaries and letters as a young infantry officer in the Civil War --a police officer's account of the Haymarket Trials --Harry Thaw's murder of the Gilded Age's most prominent architect, Stanford White, through his own published version of the events --the post-trial, public confessions of Ray Bryant and J.W. Milam for the murder of Emmett Till --the Los Angeles Police Department's investigation into the causes of the 1992 riot Taken as a whole, this anthology opens a new window on American history, revealing how violence has shaped America's past in every era.

Documenting American Violence: A Sourcebook

History

Waldrep, Christopher

Bellesiles, Michael

Americas

Oxford University Press

Violence forms a constant backdrop to American history, from the revolutionary overthrow of British rule, to the struggle for civil rights, to the present-day debates over the death penalty. It has served to challenge authority, defend privilege, advance causes, and throttle hopes. In the first anthology of its kind to appear in over thirty years, Documenting American Violence brings together excerpts from a wide range of sources about incidents of violence in the United States. Each document is set into context, allowing readers to see the event through the viewpoint of contemporary participants and witnesses and to understand how these deeds have been excused, condemned, or vilified by society. Organized topically, this volume looks at such diverse topics as famous crimes, vigilantism, industrial violence, domestic abuse, and state-sanctioned violence. Among the events these primary sources describe are: --Benjamin Franklin's account of the Conestoga massacre, when an entire village of American Indians was killed by the Paxton Boys, a group of frontier settlers --militant abolitionist John Brown's attack on Harper's Ferry --Ida B. Wells' condemnation of lynchings in the South --the massacre of General Custer's 7th Cavalry at Little Bighorn, as witnessed by Cheyenne war chief Two Moon --Nat Turner's confession about the slave revolt he led in Southampton County, Virginia --Oliver Wendell Holmes' diaries and letters as a young infantry officer in the Civil War --a police officer's account of the Haymarket Trials --Harry Thaw's murder of the Gilded Age's most prominent architect, Stanford White, through his own published version of the events --the post-trial, public confessions of Ray Bryant and J.W.

Every white southerner understood what keeping African Americans down meant and what it did not mean. It did not mean going to court; it did not mean relying on the law. It meant vigilante violence and lynching.Looking at Vicksburg, Mississippi, Roots of Disorder traces the origins of these terrible attitudes to the day-to-day operations of local courts. In Vicksburg, white exploitation of black labor through slavery evolved into efforts to use the law to define blacks' place in society, setting the stage for widespread tolerance of brutal vigilantism. Fed by racism and economics, whites' extralegal violence grew in a hothouse of more general hostility toward law and courts. Roots of Disorder shows how the criminal justice system itself plays a role in shaping the attitudes that encourage vigilantism.

Roots of Disorder: Race and Criminal Justice in the American South, 1817-80

University of Illinois Press

      Every white southerner understood         what keeping African Americans "down" meant and what it did         not mean. It did not mean going to court; it did not mean relying on the         law. It meant vigilante violence and lynching.       Looking at Vicksburg, Mississippi,         Roots of Disorder traces the origins of these terrible attitudes         to the day-to-day operations of local courts. In Vicksburg, white exploitation         of black labor through slavery evolved into efforts to use the law to         define blacks' place in society, setting the stage for widespread tolerance         of brutal vigilantism. Fed by racism and economics, whites' extralegal         violence grew in a hothouse of more general hostility toward law and courts.         Roots of Disorder shows how the criminal justice system itself         plays a role in shaping the attitudes that encourage vigilantism.       "Delivers what no other         study has yet attempted. . . . Waldrep's book is one of the first systematically         to use local trial data to explore questions of society and culture."         -- Vernon Burton, author of "A Gentleman and an Officer":         A Social and Military History of James B. Griffin's Civil War  

Race and National Power

In American history, students are taught about the three branches of government. Most of the time is spent learning about the Executive and the Legislative bodies, but the Judicial branch has had a monumental effect on the course of American history, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the area of civil rights. Race and National Power: A Sourcebook of Black Civil Rights from 1862 to 1954 gathers together a collection of primary documents on the history of law and civil rights, specifically in regard to race. The sources covered include key Supreme Court decisions, some opinions from other courts as well, and texts written by ordinary people – the victims and perpetrators of racism and the lawmakers who wrote the statutes the courts must interpret. With helpful headnotes and introductions, Race and National Power: A Sourcebook of Black Civil Rights from 1862 to 1954 is the perfect resource for anyone studying legal history or race in America.

Race and National Power: A Sourcebook of Black Civil Rights from 1862 to 1954

Africa

Routledge

This book examines African Americans' strategies for resisting white racial violence from the Civil War until the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968 and up to the Clinton era. Christopher Waldrep's semi-biographical approach to the pioneers in the anti-lynching campaign portrays African Americans as active participants in the effort to end racial violence rather than as passive victims. In telling this more than 100-year-old story of violence and resistance, Waldrep describes how white Americans legitimized racial violence after the Civil War, and how black journalists campaigned against the violence by invoking the Constitution and the law as a source of rights. He shows how, toward the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, anti-lynching crusaders Ida B. Wells and Monroe Work adopted a more sociological approach, offering statistics and case studies to thwart white claims that a black propensity for crime justified racial violence. Waldrep describes how the NAACP, founded in 1909, represented an organized, even bureaucratic approach to the fight against lynching. Despite these efforts, racial violence continued after World War II, as racists changed tactics, using dynamite more than the rope or the gun. Waldrep concludes by showing how modern day hate crimes continue the lynching tradition, and how the courts and grass-roots groups have continued the tradition of resistance to racial violence. A rich selection of documents helps give the story a sense of immediacy. Sources include nineteenth-century eyewitness accounts of lynching, courtroom testimony of Ku Klux Klan victims, South Carolina senator Ben Tillman's 1907 defense of lynching, and the text of the first federal hate crimes law.

African Americans Confront Lynching: Strategies of Resistance from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Era (The African American History Series)

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

In 1906 a white lawyer named Dabney Marshall argued a case before the Mississippi Supreme Court demanding the racial integration of juries. He carried out a plan devised by Mississippi’s foremost black lawyer of the time: Willis Mollison. Against staggering odds, and with the help of a friendly newspaper editor, he won. How Marshall and his allies were able to force the court to overturn state law and precedent, if only for a brief period, at the behest of the U.S. Supreme Court is the subject of Jury Discrimination, a book that explores the impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on America’s civil rights history.Christopher Waldrep traces the origins of Americans’ ideas about trial by jury and provides the first detailed analysis of jury discrimination. Southerners’ determination to keep their juries entirely white played a crucial role in segregation, emboldening lynchers and vigilantes like the Ku Klux Klan. As the postbellum Congress articulated ideals of national citizenship in civil rights legislation, most importantly the Fourteenth Amendment, factions within the U.S. Supreme Court battled over how to read the amendment: expansively, protecting a variety of rights against a host of enemies, or narrowly, guarding only against rare violations by state governments. The latter view prevailed, entombing the amendment in a narrow interpretation that persists to this day.Although the high court clearly denounced the overt discrimination enacted by state legislatures, it set evidentiary rules that made discrimination by state officers and agents extremely difficult to prove. Had these rules been less onerous, Waldrep argues, countless black jurors could have been seated throughout the nation at precisely the moment when white legislators and jurists were making and enforcing segregation laws. Marshall and Mollison’s success in breaking through Mississippi law to get blacks admitted to juries suggests that legal reasoning plausibly founded on constitutional principle, as articulated by the Supreme Court, could trump even the most stubbornly prejudiced public opinion.

Jury Discrimination: The Supreme Court, Public Opinion, and a Grassroots Fight for Racial Equality in Mississippi (Studies in the Legal History of the South)

University of Georgia Press

The United States Constitution records the structure of America’s public life and society, distributing power and outlining citizens’ rights and privileges. Historians Christopher Waldrep and Lynne Curry’s compilation of leading interpretive documents traces English and American constitutional thinking from its earliest roots in 1215, to the U.S. Supreme Court under the great chief justice John Marshall. These documents reveal the constitution as an idea, growing and evolving but always reflecting particular moments in history. This book records the drama of the young American nation searching for its identity.

The Constitution and the Nation: Establishing the Constitution, 1215-1829 (Teaching Texts in Law and Politics)

CURRY, LYNNE

Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers

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Books by Waldrep, Christopher

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Waldrep, Christopher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Documenting American Violence: A Sourcebook

Documenting American Violence: A Sourcebook

Roots of Disorder: Race and Criminal Justice in the American South, 1817-80

Roots of Disorder: Race and Criminal Justice in the American South, 1817-80

Race and National Power: A Sourcebook of Black Civil Rights from 1862 to 1954

Race and National Power

African Americans Confront Lynching: Strategies of Resistance from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Era (The African American History Series)

Jury Discrimination: The Supreme Court, Public Opinion, and a Grassroots Fight for Racial Equality in Mississippi (Studies in the Legal History of the South)

Jury Discrimination: The Supreme Court, Public Opinion, and a Grassroots Fight for Racial Equality in Mississippi (Studies in the Legal History of the South)

The Constitution and the Nation: Establishing the Constitution, 1215-1829 (Teaching Texts in Law and Politics)