Beaten Down: A History of Interpersonal Violence in the West(Beaten Down)

About the Book

The word "violence" conjures up images of terrorism, bombings, and lynchings. Beaten Down is concerned with more prosaic acts of physical force - a husband slapping his wife, a parent taking a birch branch to a child, a pair of drunken friends squaring off to establish who is the "better man." David Peterson del Mar accounts for the social relations of power that lie behind this intimate form of violence, this "white noise" that has always been with us, humming quietly between more explosive acts of violence. Broad in its chronological and cultural sweep, Beaten Down examines interpersonal violence in Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia beginning with Native American cultures before colonization and continuing into the mid-twentieth century. It contrasts the disparate ways of practicing and punishing interpersonal violence on each side of the U.S.-Canadian border. Del Mar concludes that we cannot comprehend the causes and moral consequences of a violent act without considering larger social relations of power, whether between colonizers and original inhabitants, between spouses, between parents and children, or between and among different ethnic groups. The author has drawn on a vast array of vivid sources, including newspaper accounts, autobiographies, novels, oral histories, historical and ethnographic publications, and hundreds of detailed court cases to account for not only the relative frequency of different forms of violence, but also the shifting definitions and perceptions of what constitutes violence. This is a thoughtful and probing account of how and why people have hit each other and the manner in which opinion makers and ordinary citizens have censured, defended, or celebrated such acts. His conclusions have important implications for an understanding of violence and perceptions of violence in contemporary society. David Peterson del Mar is adjunct assistant professor of history at Portland State University and Oregon State University. He is the author of What Trouble I Have Seen: A History of Violence against Wives.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments

Introduction

A White Fist on Their Noses: Colonization and Violence

To Take Your Own Part: Violence among the Settlers

I Was Not There to Fight: The Decline and Persistence of Violence in the Late Nineteenth Century

Plucky Women and Crazed Indians: Representing Violence and Marginality in Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver

To Do Just as He Pleased: Violence in the 1920s

Big as God Almighty and Undemanding as Dew: Violence and People of African and Japanese Descent

Epilogue: Discovering Violence

Abbreviations

Notes

Selected Bibliography of Secondary Sources

Index

About the Author :

David Peterson del Mar is adjunct assistant professor of history at Portland State University and Oregon State University. He is the author of What Trouble I Have Seen: A History of Violence against Wives.

Review :
"A remarkable, timely history of interpersonal violence."--Western Historical Quarterly "This book is exactly what its title suggests: a history not of mob or vigilante violence, which is the subject of so much historical literature dealing with the West, but of the violence of everyday eventsohusband and wife, parent and child, drunken men fighting for any or no reason. It is also about the violence of racism, of the colonizer and the colonized, of different ethnic groups. Because it deals with the Pacific Northwest and the adjacent part of Canada, the book brings a comparative dimension to the subject, probably for the first time. The book is extensively researched and hugely annotated...but it is eminently readable."--Choice "Beaten Down is an outstanding social history of how violence has affected the everyday lives of individuals. Del Mar examines, above all else, how interpersonal violence is connected to the larger cultural processes that unfolded in the Pacific Northwest over two centuries."--Keith Edgerton, Montana State University-Billings