The Gendered Politics of Lynching

You will not believe this 1934 New Yorker cartoon my friend Adam Jones dug up. What a difference a few decades makes.





















Jones writes about mass killing and has one of the foremost textbooks on the subject. Apparently a section in the new edition deals with lynching in particular, particularly the phenomenon of mob violence as entertainment. This phenomena is not unique to US racial history, of course, and has been a significant part of atrocity throughout history - the European witch-hunts and persecution of Christians in ancient Rome, to name just a few.