| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Rethinking Southern Violence: Homicides in Post–Civil War Louisiana, 1866–1884. By Gilles Vandal. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000. x, 319 pp. Cloth, $60.00, ISBN 0-8142-0838-X. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8142-5041-6.)

Since the publication of Bertram Wyatt-Brown's Southern Honor (1982), followed by Edward Ayers's Vengeance and Justice (1984) and David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed (1989), the notion that white southerners had a cultural tendency to homicide, one derived from European sources, has become a widely accepted paradigm for explaining southern violence. Gilles Vandal, professor and chair of the department of history and political sciences at the University of Sherbrooke in Canada, cautiously amasses evidence that disputes this cultural explanation. Compiling data from various government investigations, Freedmen's Bureau records, and newspapers, Vandal has collected information on nearly five thousand Louisiana homicides from 1865 to 1884. His evidence challenges cultural explanations for the South's violent propensities. "Without minimizing other factors," he writes, "politics was truly at the root of most violence in Louisiana." . . .

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