Southwestern Historical Quarterly

This issue of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly begins a new feature for a journal soon to start its 125th year of publication. Every January the editors of the Quarterly hope to publish a review essay of books published over the previous twenty years on a relevant and important topic. To initiate this project we asked Carlos Kevin Blanton to write on books about racial and ethnic violence. We asked that this review essay be as much an essay as a review of books familiar to many readers. What did the books mean? What did they signify? How did they fit within the unfolding understanding of Texas history? Blanton's essay is a worthy starting point for this addition to our normal offering.

To mark this new experiment, I selected a particularly evocative cover. After all, how often in the history of a journal this longstanding is a new feature introduced? The illustration is evocative because it depicts the lynching of George Hughes in Sherman, Texas, in 1930 from the perspective of a French journal. As Blanton points out lynching was common in Texas, and the Texas Rangers were sent to head off violence in the Sherman case. They failed, leading to questions of just how hard they tried to preserve the life and fair trial of an African American.

Memory of events in Sherman in 1930 and much else about the history of violence differs from reality for most Texans, especially Anglos. Lynching has receded in public memory while the Rangers, especially in popular culture, have more often been celebrated as exemplars of law and order and virtuous manhood. The following essay and the books under review call those silences and tropes into question. They call for an honest, nuanced, and inclusive past based on a clear-eyed examination of the evidence and the asking of new questions. [End Page 337]