Imagine a lifeless body hanging from a noose. This body is a marker not of what Michel Foucault calls the state’s power over life and death but, rather, of the power of unsanctioned citizens to “execute” a fellow citizen in the name of justice and order.¹ This is, in other words, alynchedbody. This book begins with this body and its simultaneous occurrence in two radically different contemporary American contexts. Each of the subsequent chapters in this book seeks to illuminate some aspect of how we have come to understand the significance and meaning of this body through narrative....

Early in his 1865 account of an 1864 vigilante movement in Montana, Thomas Dimsdale asserts, “It is probable that there never was a mining town of the same size that contained more desperadoes and lawless characters than did Bannack during the winter of 1862–63.”¹ His assertion about the lawless conditions in this little mining settlement is followed by a corollary claim that the formation and actions of a vigilance committee were inevitable:

Reviewing the long and bloody lists of crimes against persons and property, which last included several wholesale attempts at plunder of the stores in Virginia and Bannack,...

An ideal vigilance committee convened and acted in an organized and evenhanded manner in response to uncontrolled criminal conditions and was roundly supported and applauded by its community for doing so. This story of vigilante practice is told again and again by vigilantes, their official historians, and their later admiring chroniclers. But this construction, like the “Bible Belt pornography” of the southern lynching narrative, has only an approximate relationship to real lynching events.¹ In this chapter, I examine two secondary features of this frontier vigilante narrative—orderliness and public popularity—in order to demonstrate that the narrative of ideal vigilantism...

Vigilantes and vigilante historians were initially responsible for the narrative construction of vigilante practice as heroic—for making, to borrow Foucault’s formula, “the stuff of history from street brawls.”¹ But the vigilantes and their early chroniclers were not exclusively endowed with the power to narrate their location within larger regional historical narratives. This privilege resided with the group of men who were, in fact, positioned to create inaugural regional pasts—both archivalandnarrative—and to locate the actions of the vigilantes within these newly minted histories. As Richard Slotkin notes, “Writers in each section (of the country) attempted to...

On May 21, 1892, Ida B. Wells’s first major editorial on lynching, “Eight Men Lynched,” was published in the independent Negro newspaperFree Speech.¹ Wells’s incisive and aggressive critique of southern lynching practices provoked a vehement response in Memphis.² On May 25, the white newspaper theEvening Semitarran a violent and hate-filled editorial rejoinder to Wells’s examination of the narrative justifications of lynchers, calling on the public to “tie the wretch who utters these calumnies to a stake at the intersection of Main and Madison Sts., brand him in the forehead with a hot iron and perform upon him...

When I teach undergraduates about the history of vigilantism and lynching in the United States, I include a question on the final that asks them to compare two songs. The first song is Abel Meeropol’s (a.k.a. Lewis Allen’s) “Strange Fruit”—most famously recorded by Billie Holiday.¹ The second song, written and performed by Toby Keith, is the pro vigilante anthem “Beer for my Horses.”² I use the songs because they represent America’s two, nominally unrelated, lynching pasts.An ideal vigilance committee convened and acted in an organized and evenhanded manner in response to uncontrolled criminal conditions and was roundly supported...