Over the Threshold: Intimate Violence in Early America. (Book Reviews).

Over the Threshold: Intimate Violence in Early America. Edited by Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy. (New York and London: Routledge, 1999. Pp. viii, 296. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-415-91805-7; cloth, $75.00, ISBN 0-415-91804-9.)

Over the Threshold is a well-crafted collection of fifteen essays on violence in America to 1865. The essays range from overviews to case studies, from violence between lovers to violence against workers, and from frontier to urban settings. They are united in their attention to personal forms of violent behavior, yet they utilize diverse sources (literary, legal, personal, print culture) to try to understand the relationship of family violence to larger social identities, crises, and institutions.

Christine Daniels's introductory essay is a well-documented discussion of interdisciplinary approaches to violence within families and households that does more than summarize the essays in the volume. While not overly theoretical, Daniels suggests ways to creatively tie the essays together, such as comparing their concepts of time, space, class, and patriarchy. G. S. Rowe and Jack D. Marietta then present a descriptive statistical overview of more than thirty thousand violent crimes prosecuted in the Pennsylvania courts before the nineteenth century. While not focusing exclusively on intimate violence, this essay provides a fine background for case studies of violence in early America.

Many of these essays utilize legal records of violence. Stephanie Cole examines how local private prosecution in antebellum Baltimore could resolve violent household conflicts. James D. Rice also addresses antebellum Baltimore, combining an overview of criminal prosecution with an in-depth analysis of a parental murder of a child to highlight how community members and institutions might view intimate violence. Randolph A. Roth uses divorce and criminal records in post-Revolutionary and antebellum northern New England to describe spousal murders and other violent behavior between husbands and wives. Ed Hatton makes a case study of an antebellum wifemurder, tying shifting conceptions of love, lust, and passion to class-bound discourses on masculinity.

Rather than directly analyzing acts of violence, some of the essays look at attitudes toward unrestrained, and thus potentially violent, behavior. In a fascinating examination of early republican Philadelphia, Jacquelyn C. Miller traces the growing emphasis on rational thinking and emotional self-restraint within increasingly privatized middle-class households. Jeffrey H. Richards uses Rebecca Rush's 1812 novel Kelroy to examine the fictional realism of domestic disorder and violence in the early republic's upwardly mobile families. Edward E. Baptist explores contradictions in southern masculinity through an analysis of southern ballads about murder.

Gender and racial issues underlie many of the essays' examples of violence, and several of the authors explore the production of larger social orders through violence. Trevor Burnard uses Thomas Thistlewood's diary to analyze the systemic use of violence in the eighteenth-century Jamaican slave system. In an exemplary essay Terri L. Snyder shows the particularly gendered nature of violence committed by and against mistresses in seventeenthcentury Virginia. Snyder's work thus moves beyond descriptions of household violence to explicitly analyze the power struggles involved in intimate violence.

Beyond those already mentioned, other essays cover a range of topics. Merril D. Smith contributes an essay on infanticide in the mid-Atlantic states, Jenifer Banks examines a traveler's letters on the violence she observed on the Michigan frontier in the 1830s, and Christopher Morris describes violence in Mississippi slave families.

As with all scholarship, there is room for further research. The essays seem to work with a somewhat vaguely defined concept of violence, so it is not entirely clear why intimate violence may be different from other violence in early America. While the essays in Over the Threshold pay significant attention to whites and blacks, we see almost no mention of Native Americans, and most of the essays focus on the post-Revolutionary period. Given the scholarly attention to violence in other colonial settings, this volume might have included some scholarship that treated pre-1776 America as the colonial setting it was. For example, did intercultural misunderstandings include conflict over the acceptable degree of intimate violence? Could intimate violence be a means by which to consolidate colonial power? Finally, attention to intimate sexual violence is nearly absent from the collection.

Aside from those few caveats, Over the Threshold succeeds where other anthologies fail. Although most of the essays examine regionally and thematically limited topics, they set their scholarship against larger backdrops. The authors also manage to make their points without sensationalizing horrific episodes of violent behavior. Over the Threshold is a fine collection of essays that will appeal to graduate and undergraduate audiences as well as scholars of early American women, crime, sexuality, families, and labor. The volume provides a fascinating exploration of the many facets of intimate violence in early America.