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The purpose of my historiography paper is to examine after the Civil War what were the contributing factors of the proliferation of lynching in the south. Specially, the factor I plan to focus on is the historiography of the rise of the lynching as a spectacle. During my initial research there has been a lot of examining of the socioeconomics of lynching in the south. However, there has been a recent turn to the complex culture effects that produced white mob violence.
The latest turn in scholarship highlights how lynching formed a culture of violence. In Michael Pfeifer’s 2004 Rough Justice: Lynching in American Society, 1874-1947 that “rough justice” a culture complex authorized harsh, demeaning, and communal punishment. William Carrigan’s 2006 The Making of Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836-1916 proposes how historical memory of harsh punishment in the antebellum period affirms mob violence and the historical tradition of a culture of violence. Jacqueline Goldsby’s 2006 A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature builds off Pfeifer and Carrigan’s use of traditional historical methods. Goldsby employs a poststructuralist approach to her analysis. Karlos K. Hill of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaigns book review states, “…she argues that discursive representations of lynching such as poems, novels, plays, and short stores are important historical sources because they capture culture processes that tend to be muted or omitted from traditional lynching sources…” Amy Louise Wood’s 2009 Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America 1890-1940 expands from Goldsby’s research and studies technology of this period and how white southerners used it to strengthen white supremacy with the use of photography. Bringing another perspective of the use of photography is Amanda K. Frisken article, “A Song without Words”: Anti-Lynching Imagery in the African American Press, 1889-1898. Frisken’s perspective counters how the lynching imagery helped fuel the anti-lynching movement. Frisken writes, “Recent scholarship shows that in the early 1900s, the black press published lynching photographs and postcards, redeploying the propaganda of the lynch mob to prove that lynching occurred, and gradually to present a visual critique of lynching.” One gap, through my initial research, is how women and children responded of the use if imagery. There is very little or not any scholarship on how women and children responded to the mob violence and its imagery. This may be my argument for the future direction of my topic that could be expanded.