Book Review

Canada and the United States

Soliciting fourteen original essays in order to showcase the current scholarship on violence within families, households, and plantations in early British North America, editors Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy settle on the overarching rubric "intimate violence." Using this "catchall term" rather than "domestic violence" allows the essays to address violence among "lovers as well as husbands and wives" (p. 4), parents and children, master, slaves, and servants. Indeed, these three categories define the major structural divisions of the anthology, after an introductory chapter and two essays cast as "overviews."	1
The premise of the volume is best articulated by Randolph A. Roth, who writes that "domestic violence is situationally governed; its intensity and character depend as much on the culture and society of a particular time and place as they do on human nature, family pathology, or the institution of marriage" (p. 65). Daniels, in her introductory essay, positions the book as a response to policy makers and sociologists who have tended to view domestic violence and child abuse through ahistorical lenses. She promises that the anthology will explore three useful themes: the causes of household violence and thus perpetrators' motives, not just victims' experiences; the important context of how male roles and patriarchal arrangements were defined in particular places and times; and the false dichotomy between the modern period and a supposed era when women were more protected by blurred public/private boundaries. She directs two additional points at historians. First, current scholarship is challenging a simple regional North/South dichotomy in favor of emphasizing urban/rural differences. And second, as with early American scholarship in general, many authors are attempting to decenter middle-class subjects and standards.	2
Another, unspoken impetus behind this collection is the need for historians to develop antennae for the wide range of sources that can shed light on household violence. This stems from the fact that most longitudinal studies of criminal court records for the pre-Civil War United States yield a tiny number of spouse and child abuse prosecutions. The volume's essays largely break down into a handful that analyze a sizable run of legal cases and those that examine the social and cultural meanings of violence through readings of a single criminal case, novel, ballad, or diary (as in the essays by Jenifer Banks, Edward E. Baptist, Trevor Burnard, Ed Hatton, James D. Rice, Jeffrey H. Richards, and Merril D. Smith). Three essays (by Jacquelyn C. Miller, Christopher Morris, and Terri L. Snyder) occupy a middle ground by focusing on a small cluster of related cases or literary documents. Nearly all the essays have as a major theme the local, thus exploring for a specific region and juncture what were community perceptions of the line between the legitimate and illegitimate uses of violence.	. . .