| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 35.2

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 35.2 | 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. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $40.00.)

This fresh, innovative study of violence employs the most original research I have seen in many years. While most historians choose to study homicide, Del Mar examines common violence such as spouse abuse, child abuse, fist fighting, and killings. This methodology provides the opportunity to measure ethnic and gender factors and helps explain how and why violence levels changed in British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon from early pre-contact through the twentieth century. The author opens with a personal anecdote about corporal punishment in the 1960s. Whippings were "tinctured, I now think, by sadism. The pain inflicted was more apt to be emotional than physical" (p. 3). Peterson Del Mar admits that many historians would think that personal violence is not the real "stuff of history." He, however, discovered that one was "more likely to be injured or even killed by a parent, spouse, or friend than by a member of a vigilante or terrorist group" (p. 5).

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