Beaten down: a history of interpersonal violence in the West

Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. A White Fist on Their Noses: Colonization and Violence -- 2. To Take Your Own Part: Violence among the Settlers -- 3. I Was Not There to Fight: The Decline and Persistence of Violence in the Late Nineteenth Century -- 4. Plucky Women and Crazed Italians: Representing Violence and Marginality in Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver -- 5. To Do Just as He Pleased: Violence in the 1920s -- 6. 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.

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. 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