History, Department of
Date of this Version
2023
Citation
Reviews in American History 51 (2023) 143–151
Abstract
Americans are grappling with everyday political and personal violence on a variety of fronts. Escalating frustrations with alternating police inaction and violence, failed explanations of gender- and racially motivated mass-shootings, and the heartbreaking centrality of children in this violence—as both victims and perpetrators—leave many onlookers desperate to understand how these acts have come to be so distinctly American. A cadre of scholars are focused on this problem: criminologists, lawyers, political scientists, psychologists, sociologists, and, applying their own unique set of tools and methodologies, historians.1 Among the historians concerned with the peculiarities of American violence are those who specialize in the North American West, a region characterized in the popular imagination and in most scholarly treatments as fundamentally violent.2
Comments
Used by permission.