Description
Book SynopsisThis important and timely book explains the political culture of violence that has shaped the United States from its inception. It will engage students, scholars and general readers interested in American history, African American history, and American studies.
Trade Review'Violence is central to American statecraft. In this remarkable book, Scott Gac unpicks individual, group, and institutional expressions of power, refracted through race, gender, and class. It is a chilling account of how and why violence became a 'national tradition' in US history.' Joanna Bourke, author of Wounding the World: How Military Violence and War-Play Invades Our Lives
'Scott Gac's ambitious and passionate book traces the emergence of a particularly American idea of when, why, for whom and against whom the powerful, and particularly the government, ought to use violence. Gac proposes the growth of this violent tradition as a throughline with which to rethink our national narrative, particularly through 1877, but also beyond. He reveals continuities among the violence of enslavement and lynching, capitalist violence, military violence, and frontier violence, and in doing so dramatically changes the significance of people and events you thought you knew, from George Washington to Revolutionary soldiers, to Robert Smalls, to striking railroad workers.' Elaine S. Frantz, author of Ku Klux: The Birth of the Klan During Reconstruction
'Scott Gac's Born in Blood illuminates the endemic violence along the front edge of the catastrophe more commonly known as American Freedom.' Walter Johnson, author of The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States
Table of ContentsIntroduction. A system of violence: liberal society in the United States; Part I. Early Manifestations: 1. A revolution restrained; 2. Life in the army of the continent; 3. The code of American violence; Part II. Evolutions: 4. The 1850s: a people's government and the politics of belligerence; 5. The United States greets John Brown; 6. 1860: the undisputed election that sparked dispute; 7. Emancipation's fury; Part III. Modern Traditions: 8. To 1877: American capitalism and the geography of violence; 9. Layering law and resistance in the Great Strikes; 10. Words and ropes: the postwar battles over racial order; Epilogue.
