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Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History. Ed. by Michael A. Bellesiles. (New York: New York University Press, 1999. x, 453 pp. Cloth, $65.00, ISBN 0-8147-12959. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8147-1296-7.)
Lethal Imagination represents a new wave of American historical scholarship that is turning away from big outbreaks and massive uprisings to micro-level violence: homicide, the abuse of females and children, family violence, and, in general, violence at the grass roots. Notable in Lethal Imagination are the stories of obscure individuals that strikingly underscore many of the essays. In Ann M. Little's essay on wifely abuse of husbands in the New Haven colony there is the widow Francis Hitchcock, whose colorful language exposed the sometime weakness of masculine authority in the colony. Laura F. Edwards's piece on women and domestic violence in nineteenth-century North Carolina introduces us to the fighting spouses Cynthia and Richard Oliver. Mary E. Odems study of rape victims in early-twentiethcentury Alameda County, California, resurrects from historical anonymity the teenager Catherine Shultz, who was repeatedly violated by her father over many years. Of another race was the Louisiana freedwoman Martha Kempone of many African American females singled out in Uche Egemonye's study of assaults against...