This Is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861–1927 . By Brent M. S. Campney.

Abstract

This Is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861–1927 . By Brent M. S. Campney. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. xi + 284 pp. Maps, tables, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. $50.00.) T his is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861–1927 represents an interesting cross-pollination between closely rendered, quantitative, and detailed community studies of lynching carried out by historians and sociologists, and a series of interpretive frameworks on lynching and vigilantism recently proposed by interdisciplinary and postcolonial scholars. In a way, one might read Brent M.S. Campney as extending W. Fitzhugh Brundage’s exacting accounting of lynching in specific southern communities to the (mid)western comparative frame proposed by the literary scholar Lisa Arellano—and in doing so, centering violence as the object of study as called for by Kidada E. Williams. All this is to say that Campney’s book goes beyond a simple annotated count of reported lynchings in Kansas. Instead, he grapples with … belew{at}uchicago.edu