Massacres and mass killings have always marked if not shaped the history of the world and as such are subjects of increasing interest among historians. The premise underlying this collection is that massacres were an integral, if not accepted part (until quite recently) of warfare, and that they were often fundamental to the colonizing process in the early modern and modern worlds. Making a deliberate distinction between ‘massacre’ and ‘genocide’, the editors call for an entirely separate and new subject under the rubric of ‘Massacre Studies’, dealing with mass killings that are not genocidal in intent. This volume offers a reflection on the nature of mass killings and extreme violence across regions and across centuries, and brings together a wide range of approaches and case studies.

Lynch mobs in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America exacted horrifying public torture and mutilation on their victims. In Lynching and Spectacle, Amy Wood explains what it meant for white Americans to perform and witness these sadistic spectacles and how lynching played a role in establishing and affirming white supremacy. Lynching, Wood argues, overlapped with a variety of cultural practices and performances, both traditional and modern, including public executions, religious rituals, photography, and cinema, all which encouraged the horrific violence and gave it social acceptability. However, she also shows how the national dissemination of lynching images ultimately fueled the momentum of the antilynching movement and the decline of the practice. Using a wide range of sources, including photos, newspaper reports, pro- and antilynching pamphlets, early films, and local city and church records, Wood reconfigures our understanding of lynching's relationship to modern life. Wood expounds on the critical role lynching spectacles played in establishing and affirming white supremacy at the turn of the century, particularly in towns and cities experiencing great social instability and change. She also shows how the national dissemination of lynching images fueled the momentum of the antilynching movement and ultimately led to the decline of lynching. By examining lynching spectacles alongside both traditional and modern practices and within both local and national contexts, Wood reconfigures our understanding of lynching's relationship to modern life.

The history of lynching and mob violence has become a subject of considerable scholarly and public interest in recent years. Popular works by James Allen, Philip Dray, and Leon Litwack have stimulated new interest in the subject. A generation of new scholars, sparked by these works and earlier monographs, are in the process of both enriching and challenging the traditional narrative of lynching in the United States. This volume contains essays by ten scholars at the forefront of the movement to broaden and deepen our understanding of mob violence in the United States. These essays range from the Reconstruction to World War Two, analyze lynching in multiple regions of the United States, and employ a wide range of methodological approaches. The authors explore neglected topics such as: lynching in the Mid-Atlantic, lynching in Wisconsin, lynching photography, mob violence against southern white women, black lynch mobs, grassroots resistance to racial violence by African Americans, nineteenth century white southerners who opposed lynching, and the creation of 'lynching narratives' by southern white newspapers. This book was first published as a special issue of American Nineteenth Century History

DIVFocuses on perpetrators of human rights crimes, investigating confessions by human rights violators in contexts of transitional justice in South America and South Africa./div

This ambitious study traces the strategies of human rights activists to show how world-changing reform movements were shaped by women and men from modest backgrounds who were deeply attuned to the power of performance. Tracy C. Davis explores nineteenth-century reform campaigns through the pioneering work of a family of activists – prominent anti-slavery lecturer George Thompson, his daughter Amelia (the first female theatre and music critic for a British daily newspaper) and her husband, the political organizer Frederick Chesson. Engaging in some of the most important social struggles of the late Georgian and Victorian periods – including abolition, enfranchisement, and anti-genocide - this book reveals how two generations' insights into performance consolidated into activist tactics that persist today. Characterised by a skilful deployment of performance theory alongside deep and wide-ranging historical knowledge, this ground-breaking work demonstrates what 'dramaturgy' can teach us about 'history'.

Recently, the U.S. has seen a rise in misogynistic and race-based violence perpetrated by men expressing a sense of grievance, from "incels" to alt-right activists. Grounding sociological, historical, political, and economic analyses of masculinity through the lens of cultural narratives in many forms and expressions, The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture suggests that how we examine the stories that shape us in turn shapes our understanding of our current reality and gives us language for imagining better futures. Masculinity is more than a description of traits associated with particular performances of gender. It is more than a study of gender and social power. It is an examination of the ways in which gender affects our capacity to engage ethically with each other in complex human societies. This volume offers essays from a range of established, global experts in American masculinity as well as new and upcoming scholars in order to explore not just what masculinity once meant, has come to mean, and may mean in the future in the U.S.; it also articulates what is at stake with our conceptions of masculinity.

Illuminates the relationship between performance and the American charity movement