2019/01/01 by Charles Seguin, David L. Rigby · 68 citations
Social Sciences · #Race, History, and American Society #Political Conflict and Governance #Crime Patterns and Interventions #State (computer science) #Period (music) #Political science #Data set #Geography #History #Statistics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1177/2378023119841780
published in Socius Sociological Research for a Dynamic World 5 (SAGE Publishing)
openalex publication_date 2019/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/15
Historians are increasingly studying lynching outside of the American Southeast, but sociologists have been slow to follow. We introduce a new public data set that extends existing data on lynching victims to cover the contiguous United States from 1883 to 1941. These data confirm that lynching was a heterogeneous practice across the United States. We differentiate between three different regimes over this period: a Wild West regime, characterized mostly by the lynching of whites in areas with weak state penetration; a slavery regime, found in former slave states, characterized mostly by the lynching of blacks; and a third minor regime, characterized by the lynching of Mexican nationals mostly along the Texas-Mexico border. We also note great variability at the county level in the extent of lynching. By contrast, we find very little state-level variability in lynching once local and regional regimes are considered. We discuss the implications of local and regional heterogeneity for quantitative lynching research using these data.