American Violence

Scott Gac is Professor of History and Co-Director of the Primus Project at Trinity College, USA. He is the author of Singing for Freedom (2007) and Born in Blood: Violence and the Making of America (2024).Caroline E. Light is a Senior Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Harvard's Program in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, USA. She is the author of Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense (2017).

"I cannot think of a book that is more timely than American Violence. These carefully curated essays offer a brilliant kaleidoscope of perspectives addressing the enduring legacy of violence in America. We must reckon with the hard truth that violence in America is not a bug, but a feature of our society. We owe a debt to scholars who compel us to face these challenges and work to change them." Kellie Carter Jackson, Associate Professor in the Department of Africana Studies at Wellesley College, USA“Scholars Scott Gac and Caroline Light have offered us a new lens for which to understand American history, violence. Since its colonial origins, violence helped create the United States and American Violence details this history fully. This much needed text is expansive in scope and incisive in the analyses its authors employ. Ultimately, this text demands that readers think about violence as central to American identity.”Deirdre Cooper Owens, Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies, University of Connecticut, USA"American Violence offers a major scholarly contribution to understanding how violence has shaped American history and society. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in studying the material and political conditions of violence. By connecting histories too often studied in isolation, from policing to borderlands to self-defense laws, the book explores how violence has undergirded and shaped sovereignty and civil society. It includes an impressive line-up of thinkers from different specialisms with an informative overview by the editors, Scott Gac and Caroline Light."Jennifer Tucker, Professor of Technology, Law and Visual, Wesleyan University, USA

• Introduction: Violence at the Center, 1: Managed Freedom: Conquest, Slavery, and Coercion in the American Liberal State, 2: Frozen Violence: Understanding the Permanence of Genocide Against American Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples Within the United States and Canada, 3: Instruments of Power: Between Violence and Care in the History of Atlantic Slavery, 4: Black Fungibility, 5: It is Heritage: Objectifying the Black Body in American Bioarchaeology, 6: Forged through the Crucible of Interracial Violence: New York State Lynchings and the Formation of a Northern White Identity in the Late-Nineteenth Century, 7: English Tradition, American Violence: The Origins of American Gun Regulation, 8: "Endangering the Peace and Safety of the State": Violence, Self-Defense, and Limitations on Constitutional Protections for The People, 9: Vigilantism and Self-Defense, 10: Disarming Analogies: The Difference Between Police and Soldiers’ Right to Lethal Violence, 11: Momma You Was in the Riot!: Black Maternal Activism and Civil Unrest, 12: Antigone on the Border: Violence, Damage, and Desire in the US-Mexico Borderlands, 13: The Slow Violence of Wrongful Convictions: Frank Sterling and the Human Cost of the Carceral State, 14: Violence as Memory, Memory as Violence: The Case of the 1964 “Mississippi Burning” Murders, 15: Distorted Chronologies: DARVO and the Weaponization of Self-Defense, 16: The Iron River: How the Second Amendment Shapes Global Conflict