| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Christopher Waldrep. The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2002. Pp. x, 264. $35.00.
Long consigned to a sidebar, lynching is now a central feature of America's history. The story was usually that of a white mob dragging a black prisoner, sometimes several, from a jail or home to the lynching tree. A rope and sometimes fire, guns, and clubs produced a brutal death. Often a photographer captured the dangling body and the faces of the crowd, numbering in the hundreds and even thousands. Legal authorities and community leaders found no reason to condemn or punish the lynchers; indeed, their violence was the will of the sovereign people. Americans repeated this drama thousands of times, mostly in the South but in the North, too. In recent years, scholars have begun to study lynching more carefully, so that now we have a shelf full of fine books on the subject. They add to the conclusion that these tragedies are not anomalies but essential parts of the answer to the eternal question, "what is America?"	1
White mobs murdering black Americans is the traditional definition of lynching. Christopher Waldrep gives due attention to this feature but ventures far more broadly through different meanings and across time, from the eighteenth-century beginnings to present-day representation in hate crimes. Waldrep focuses less on the details of this violence and more on the meaning of the word "lynching." It will come as no surprise to historians that the meaning of a single word changed across decades and centuries; what is interesting is the struggle to claim the word and to control its meaning, as Waldrep so carefully analyzes.	. . .

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