Reviews of Books

How can we comprehend the meanings, motivations, and purposes of a husband bludgeoning his wife to death, a mother forcing her daughter to ingest fatal poisons, or a master systematically whipping his slave and then applying lime and salt to the wounds to increase the pain, to the point of death? These are among the tasks confronting the scholar of intimate violence in early America. Like all core experiences (love, death, sex), violence can seem deceptively familiar and thus transhistorical. To others, horrific abuse is simply dismissed as incomprehensible. But as the most successful essays in Over the Threshold demonstrate, violence, like other universal human experiences, takes on meanings, achieves purposes, and is motivated by conditions specific to time, place, and—most fundamental—the cultural ideas and social structures of a given society. Rather than being unfathomable, the study of intimate violence in early America has the potential to expose the workings of power relations in the most important social organizations of those societies—the household and the family.	1
Over the Threshold brings together fourteen essays and an introduction exploring intimate violence in locations throughout British America from settlement to the eve of the Civil War. It explores instances of violence between husbands and wives, lovers, parents and children, and masters and servants or slaves. As co-editor Christine Daniels explains in the introductory essay, the anthology has several goals. It aims to complicate our understanding of the workings of patriarchy and paternalism and to develop connections between public and private family life. From such inquiries, Daniels proposes, we can develop a usable past for scholars and policy advocates concerned with contemporary domestic violence. Although the essays themselves are uneven in quality, many do succeed in meeting these goals. But Over the Threshold suffers from a lack of coherence. The introduction lacks a strong set of analytical questions and offers few overarching conclusions. Even so, the collection supplies an important opportunity to define a framework for understanding domestic violence in historical perspective. The following comments draw on the best essays to present key elements for such a framework and to suggest promising avenues for future research.	2
First, the exploration of intimate violence can be most productive when the site of study is local and the methodology allows for close analysis of competing understandings of what constituted acceptable and unacceptable violence. One way into this contested realm is to probe customary and legal methods of adjudicating conflict in everyday life. As Stephanie Cole demonstrates in "Keeping the Peace: Domestic Assault and Private Prosecution in Antebellum Baltimore," early Americans had their own versions of temporary restraining orders. Though Maryland law was designed to uphold the "right" of a patriarch to "correct" a wayward wife, in practice women could initiate private prosecution of abusive husbands. By lodging a complaint with a justice of the peace, a wife called forth the legal apparatus for her own protection. A husband charged with abuse was obliged to post bond for his future good behavior; presumably, he would be on his guard lest the money be forfeited. By this means, abused wives participated in defining unacceptable domestic violence and policing its boundaries.	. . .