| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Beaten Down: A History of Interpersonal Violence in the West. By David Peterson del Mar. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002. x, 300 pp. $40.00, ISBN 0-295-98260-8.)

Lynching in Colorado, 1859–1919. By Stephen J. Leonard. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2002. xvi, 246 pp. $24.95, ISBN 0-87081-680-2.)

Violence, considered academically, is more sociology than it is history. Historical treatment of U.S. violence is most often associated either with a region or a city or with American race and ethnicity. Both books reviewed here cheat, in a sense, by discussing region and race while generally avoiding much of the voluminous literature associated with those rubrics.

Beaten Down andLynching in Coloradoare late-nineteenth-century U.S. western social histories, and they treat racial and ethnic issues as at least concomitant with violence. Stephen J. Leonard's book is really about notorious "old" wild West violence, but both authors manage to dress violence up in "new" western garb. David Peterson del Mar begins by declaring his sociological purpose: Beaten Down is "not an orthodox history" and is neither comparative nor "traditional" history (p. 9). He explores "the relationship between power and interpersonal violence" (ibid.) but only in selected portions of Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia. Yet his subtitle proclaims his book to be "A History of ... the West."

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