How a culture of violence legitimized lynching among ordinary people

On May 15, 1916, a crowd of fifteen thousand witnessed the lynching of an eighteen-year-old black farm worker named Jesse Washington. Most central Texans of the time failed to call for the punishment of the mob’s leaders. In The Making of a Lynching Culture, now in paperback, William D. Carrigan seeks to explain not how a fiendish mob could lynch one man but how a culture of violence that nourished this practice could form and endure for so long among ordinary people.

Beginning with the 1836 independence of Texas, The Making of a Lynching Culture reexamines traditional explanations of lynching, including the role of the frontier, economic tensions, and political conflicts. Using a voluminous body of court records, newspaper accounts, oral histories, and other sources, Carrigan shows how notions of justice and historical memory were shaped to glorify violence and foster a culture that legitimized lynching.

Contents
 Acknowledgments
 Introduction
 1. "Texas Shall Be Americanized": Mob Violence in the Conquest of
 Mexican Texas
 2. "Necessity Knows No Law": Mob Violence in the Conquest of
 Central Texas's Native Americans
 3. "Slavery with a Will": Slave Resistance and the Origins of the
 Panic of 1860
 4. "Hung Sure as Hell": White-on-White Mob Violence in Central
 Texas
 5. "No Justice in It": Racial Violence during Reconstruction
 6. "A New Crime": The Changing Character of Mob Violence in the
 Late Nineteenth Century
 7. "A Damnable Outrage": Mob Violence in Twentieth-Century
 Central Texas
 Epilogue
 Notes
 Appendix A: Victims of Mob Violence in Central Texas, 1860-1922
 Appendix B: Possible Additional Cases of Mob Violence in Central
 Texas, 1860-1922
 Appendix C: Essay on Sources
 Index




Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication: Mobs Texas History 19th century, Mobs Texas History 20th century, Vigilance committees Texas History 19th century, Vigilance committees Texas History 20th century, Lynching Texas History 19th century, Lynching Texas History 20th century