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The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836-1916. By William D. Carrigan. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, c. 2004. Pp. xiv, 308. $35.00, ISBN 0-252-02951-8.)
Most books about lynching have been general studies or have focused on single lynching incidents. By taking a regional approach, William D. Carrigan, assistant professor of history at Rowan University, sheds light on a long recognized but little studied aspect: the development of a lynching culture, the idea that people had a "right to lynch."
The seven-county area around Waco, Texas, provides a fine laboratory for how a culture of lynching can develop and then dissipate. The region has a well-documented history of lynch mobs and vigilantism stretching from the 1830s to the 1920s. Carrigan finds that the culture of lynching began to grow out of the area's history of bloody struggle against the...