At the Altar of Lynching: Burning Sam Hose in the American South (Cambridge Studies on the American South) - Hardcover

Mathews, Donald G.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1107182972 ISBN 13: 9781107182974

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2017

Synopsis

The story of a black day-laborer called Sam Hose killing his white employer in a workplace dispute ended in a lynching of enormous religious significance. For many deeply-religious communities in the Jim Crow South, killing those like Sam Hose restored balance to a moral cosmos upended by a heinous crime. A religious intensity in the mood and morality of segregation surpassed law, and in times of social crisis could justify illegal white violence - even to the extreme act of lynching. In At the Altar of Lynching, distinguished historian Donald G. Mathews offers a new interpretation of the murder of Sam Hose, which places the religious culture of the evangelical South at its center. He carefully considers how mainline Protestants, including women, not only in many instances came to support or accept lynching, but gave the act religious meaning and justification.

About this title

Book Description:

Renowned historian Donald G. Mathews offers a new interpretation of the lynching of Sam Hose, framing it as a religious and moral story within the culture of deeply-religious communities in the Jim Crow South. This book will appeal to those studying southern history, African American history, and Southern religion.

About the Author:

Donald G. Mathews has taught at Duke and Princeton Universities, as well as at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has studied and written about religion and the South for over fifty years, publishing three books and over thirty articles. He is the author of Religion in the Old South (1979) and co-author of Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA (1993).

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1107182972
• ISBN 13: 9781107182974
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 354