NEW: In August 2007, I joined the History Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, 445 W. 59th St., New York, NY 10019, tel (212) 237-8856, e-mail mpfeifer@jjay.cuny.edu.

    I teach American social and cultural history, which is the history of people's everyday lives and activities.  My specialty is in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in the history of race and the social history of law, but I am also interested in other periods.

Background
    I was born in 1968 and raised in suburban and small town settings in southcentral Wisconsin.  I earned my B.A. in history, with a minor in Russian, from Washington University in St. Louis in 1991.  There, I wrote a senior thesis on lynching in Missouri.  That experience sparked a strong interest in the histories of the American South and of the American West, and in regional and state histories.   It also showed me how the study of violence could powerfully illuminate underlying societal values concerning criminal justice, race, gender, and social class.  For a year of my undergraduate work, 1989-1990, I also studied medieval and early modern English history and American history at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK.  I received an M.A. in history from the University of Iowa in Iowa City in 1993 and a Ph.D. in history from Iowa in 1998.  For my doctoral dissertation, I expanded my consideration of lynching, comparing the phenomenon in three different American regions, the South, the Midwest, and the West, by analyzing the states of Louisiana, Iowa, and Wyoming.  I joined the Evergreen State College faculty in September 1999.  I was attracted to Evergreen by the college's profound commitment to interdisciplinary learning that occurs in communities of students and faculty.  I'm especially interested in finding ways to help students question their assumptions about the past, which are often grounded in presentist notions of a "progressive" course of historical development, and to instead apply rigorous analysis to their study of history.  I'm also committed to helping students learn how to articulate thoughtful opinions, in seminar settings and in their writing.

Catholic Student Group
    I am the faculty advisor for Evergreen's Catholic student group, founded in Winter 2000.  Our mission statement is: "To promote the spiritual development and peace and justice involvement of Catholic students at TESC and to assist them and other interested students in living out their faith.  To work in collaboration with other TESC student groups in social justice and peace movements."  For our web page, see http://www.seattlearch.org/BuildingCommunity/CampusMinistries/ccm-evergreen.htm.

Research
    In 2004, the University of Illinois Press published my book, Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874-1947, which might be characterized as the first national, cross-regional study of lynching and criminal justice in American history; a paperback edition is forthcoming in 2006.  Previous monographs have studied American collective violence only within particular regions (the South and the West), and have eschewed analysis of the linkages between lynching and notions of law in favor of explanations that stress economics and social structure.  From extensive research in newspapers, court records, coroner's inquests, and personal correspondence, the book ties lynching to understandings of criminal justice, strongly influenced by notions of race and gender, that varied across social classes and regions.  It is dedicated to the victims of lynching and legal execution.
    I argue that in the last three decades of the nineteenth century midwestern, western, and southern lynchers shared a commitment to "rough justice," the harsh, informal, and often communal punishment of what they perceived as serious criminal behavior.  Rural and working class lynchers failed to assimilate conceptions of a rational, detached, antiseptic legal process promoted by urban middle class reformers.  Only the states of New England and the mid Atlantic avoided this prolonged cultural conflict, waged everywhere else in newspaper columns and courtrooms by day, and on tree limbs outside courthouses by night.  In the Northeast, concentrated capitalist transformation in the antebellum period created powerful middle classes who reshaped legal institutions and public opinion in such a way by the late nineteenth century that "rough justice" sentiments could be channeled into a reformed, and allegedly sanitized, but nonetheless prolific death penalty.  Eventually the rural and working class "rough justice" enthusiasts who endorsed mob murder in the Midwest, West, and South compromised with the bourgeois advocates of due process law.  In the early twentieth century, states in those regions, aping the punitive innovations of northeastern states, revamped the death penalty into a comparatively efficient, technocratic, and highly racialized mechanism of retributive justice, and lynchings ceased.
    This research analyzes the diverse historical experiences of Iowa, Wyoming, Louisiana, Wisconsin, New York State, Washington state, California, and Alaska.  For detailed, approximately complete lists of confirmed lynchings for a state that I have compiled from my research, click on the state's name.  Since these lists are verified from reliable primary and secondary sources, they are considerably more accurate than the lists compiled by the Tuskegee Institute and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the early twentieth century.  For near lynchings in Iowa, click here.  Also, for lynchings in Missouri, Minnesota, and Delaware, click on those state's names.
    I've published refereed articles on lynching and criminal justice in Western Legal History, Pacific Northwest Quarterly, The Annals of Iowa, Louisiana History, and Gateway Heritage and book reviews on related topics in a number of scholarly journals (see my CV).  Additionally, I am a book review editor for H-Law, a listserv for historians of law.

    I've begun work on another book under contract with the University of Illinois Press, The Roots of Rough Justice: The Origins of Lynching in the United States, which extends my cross-regional consideration of American lynching back in time, into the seventeenth century as well as into an early modern and medieval European heritage.  It explores how customary lethal and nonlethal communal mechanisms of enforcing social control transformed on the midwestern, western, and southern frontiers from the 1820s through the 1850s  into deadly, patterned collective killings that enforced class and racial prerogatives.

    My work on lynching in Louisiana was cited on the U.S. Senate Floor on June 13, 2005, by Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., as she introduced Senate Resolution 39, "Apologizing to Lynching Victims and their Descendants."  My research has also been cited in newspapers that include USA TODAY, Newsday, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Shreveport (La.) Times, the Bakersfield Californian, the White Plains (N.Y.) Journal-News, the Janesville (Wisc.) Gazette, the Tacoma News-Tribune, and the Centralia (Wash.) Chronicle.
 
 

Here are some links to my work:

Curriculum Vitae

"A Lethal Transition: Regulator Movements, Law, and Extralegal Punishment in the Antebellum United States."
 Presented at the British Association of American Studies (BAAS) Meeting,
 Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, April 16, 2004.

                                                                   "Lynching, Law, and Region in the Postbellum United States."
                                                                                                     Presented at the
                                                       Lynching and Racial Violence in America: Histories and Legacies Conference,

             Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, October 5, 2002

"Lynching and Criminal Justice: The Midwest and West as American Regions, 1878-1920."
           Presented at the 39th Annual Western History Association Conference,
Portland, Ore., October 9, 1999

"Race and Lynching in the American West in the Early Twentieth Century."
Presented at the British Association of American Studies (BAAS)
Meeting at Keele University, Newcastle-under-Lyme, UK, April 7, 2001

“‘Midnight Justice’ in the Pacific Northwest: Lynching and Law in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, 1882-1919.”
Presented at the American Historical Association West Coast Branch's
Ninety-Fourth Annual Meeting, Vancouver, British Columbia, August 11, 2001

"'…the already scarlet record of Jefferson parish':
      Analysis of a Lynching Syndrome, 1892-1897."
      Presented at the Southern Historical Association’s Annual Meeting,
      New Orleans, La., November 17, 2001

                                                                     Many thanks to Anna Dillard for her fine assistance with this page

This page was last updated on 8/21/07