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What Virtue There is in Fire: Cultural Memory and the Lynching of Sam Hose, by Edwin T. Arnold. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009. 264 pp. $28.95 cloth.
IN WHAT VIRTUE THERE IS IN FIRE: CULTURAL MEMORY AND THE Lynching of Sam Hose, Edwin T. Arnold examines a series of lynchings in 1899 in an area near and around Newnan, Georgia. One purpose of the book is to recover the memory of these events, which have been largely suppressed or repressed in the local and state memory. Arnold, who grew up in the Newnan area, remarks that he had never heard of the lynching of Sam Hose or related killings. He draws on numerous sources-especially newspaper accounts as well as studies by historians and sociologists and others both at the time of the events as well as more recent ones-to reconstruct and to try to understand what happened. He treats the Hose lynching as an iconic, emblematic episode in the history of Georgia, the South, and the United States.
What is notable about the Sam Hose lynching is the ferocity of the crowd that carried it out. This was not the work of a few men. Rather it was a crowd of several thousand men and women-more or less normal white citizens from every economic and social class. The Hose lynching was the first so-called "spectacle lynching," one attended by much publicity and drama, widely publicized in the local and national press. Sam Hose, according to Arnold, may actually have been guilty of killing Alfred Cranford and of raping his wife in April 1899. Arnold...