Documenting American Violence brings to light a wide variety of evidence from across the spectrum of American history: both well-known texts and those that had previously remained obscure. The volume is first and foremost an excellent sourcebook. Having said that, the volume goes beyond providing access to what otherwise might seem to be an eclectic selection of source material by contextualising its sources within existing debates on the nature of American violence.

The introductory essay provides the necessary terminological definitions and historiographical frameworks that are expected from a work aimed at what one might assume to be a university undergraduate audience. However, given the contentious subject matter and the likelihood of a wider public interest, the book is also readily accessible to a wider readership.

The volume does not aim to provide an all-encompassing definition of American violence, as it concedes in its very first line that “violence is incoherent” (3). Resultantly, the book and the documents it contains reflect a very broad definition of violence. However, the introductory essay also makes clear that the book focuses on violence particularly as a “domestic tradition” and not as an instrument of foreign policy, providing an important distinction in the book’s scope. The volume sets out to allow readers to “formulate an individual understanding of America’s historical experience of violence,” in order that it might be addressed more effectively by society, and this is perhaps the most compelling of its many aspirations (10).

Following on from the introductory chapter, each subsequent chapter in the book is preceded by a short prefatory essay that sets out the commonality of the documents that have been brought together in that section. Following this, each separate source is prefigured by another short passage setting the document in its relative historical context. The variegated nature of the sources within the first chapter, entitled “Crime as a Social Drama,” perfectly summarises one of the book’s numerous aims, which is to investigate violent events that “have been sensationalized into metaphors, violent acts made to stand for some larger trend” (3). This chapter begins with a criminal’s confession to a minister in 1698 whilst en route to the gallows and ends with an extract relating events from the O.J. Simpson trial. However, the themes of the majority of the following chapters follow a largely chronologically based topical progression with themes ranging from violence in colonial America (Chapter 2), through the Civil War (Chapter 5), to twentieth-century civil rights (Chapter 10). This is not to say that there the book fluctuates from chronological to thematic, but rather approaches numerous aspects of violence that were, if not peculiar to a certain period, perhaps characteristic of that period. The chapters that depart most from the chronological pattern are Chapter 9, “Violence as a Means of Crime Control,” and Chapter 11, “Lost to History,” which follow broader themes reminiscent of the first chapter. Chapter 11 explores the frequently overlooked issue of domestic violence against women, bringing together sources from across three centuries for comparison.

Overall, the book reveals violence to be an issue that has confronted and shaped American history since its earliest beginnings and an issue that is still ever-present in the minds of Americans today. The volume’s great variety of aptly chosen sources allows the reader to form a broad and well-rounded view of the role that violence has played in American history and serves to underline the importance to historians of accepting the book’s contention that violence “forms a background for all American history” (4).