Massacres are everywhere. At least that is the impression one could get from recent newspaper headlines like : « Massacre at Columbine High School ». « Jaguars massacre Dolphins ». « Massacre in Yugoslavia ». From a shooting by some disgruntled teenagers to sports, like the devastating defeat meted out to the Miami Dolphins by the Jacksonville Jaguars, to the annihilation of a village in the Balkans, massacres seem to be all around us. A search of the word « massacre » on the Internet produce..

Gallant, Thomas W.

OpenEdition

 Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History &
Societies 
Vol. 5, n°1 | 2001
Varia
Levene (Mark) and Roberts (Penny), (Eds.), The
Massacre in History
Oxford, Berghahn Books, 1999, 20 pp., 6 half-tones, maps, ISBN 1
57181934 7
Thomas W. Gallant
Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/chs/800
ISSN: 1663-4837
Publisher
Librairie Droz
Printed version
Date of publication: 1 January 2001
Number of pages: 146-148
ISBN: 2-600-00607-9
ISSN: 1422-0857
 
Electronic reference
Thomas W. Gallant, « Levene (Mark) and Roberts (Penny), (Eds.), The Massacre in History », Crime,
Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies [Online], Vol. 5, n°1 | 2001, Online since 02 April 2009,
connection on 02 May 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/chs/800 
© Droz
146 
about». It was, he tells us, a «mysterious crime in a class of society where», he 
believed, « deeds of violence are not only foreign, but usually wildly impossible » -
the upper or upper-middle classes. It was «purely a problem in murder», the evi-
dence was «purely circumstantial», chance figured prominently in sequence of 
events, and finally, it was a case that attracted national attention. Thus, in his own 
introductory words, Pearson introduces us to his literary perspective on crime 
writing, a vocation he took quite seriously not only for its entertainment value - its 
storytelling possibilities - but also for the range of commentary such tales provoked 
about daily life and culture in the American past. 
And for the historian this is precisely where Pearson's work is so interesting and 
rich. He always contextualized his crime narratives, providing beautifully drawn 
descriptions of a specific town or street, details of domestic interiors and family 
habits, and even brief accounts of pertinent national and international events. Thus 
the settings themselves take on a richness characteristic of Conan Doyle or Edgar 
Poe, while the historical context is both precise and time specific. In addition, 
Pearson's tales are always sensitive to the nuances of social class and position - the 
witnesses who must be jailed to be secured, the culinary details of a Victorian house-
hold - as well as to the legal and judicial issues involved in high profile murder 
cases. Equally interesting is his own fascination with the influence of the press on 
public opinion and the ways in which sensational events are refigured from their 
original tellings in the public press into a range of popular literary works - novels, 
stories and plays. 
Pearson deserves more significant study (I was unable to turn up one recent crit-
ical treatment of him). He wrote a great deal and his work, both the occasional essay, 
the commentaries on books and book collecting, and certainly his crime stories, 
offer much to the general reader as well as to the literary scholar and historian of 
crime and culture. I hope that the publication of Studies in Murder indicates a 
renewed interest in Pearson's work. 
Amy Gilman Srebnick 
Montclair State University 
Srebnicka@mail.montclair.edu 
Levene (Mark) and Roberts (Penny), (Eds.), The Massacre in History, Oxford, 
Berghahn Books, 1999,320 pp., 6 half-tones, maps, ISBN 1 57181934 7 
Massacres are everywhere. At least that is the impression one could get from 
recent newspaper headlines like: «Massacre at Columbine High School». «Jaguars 
massacre Dolphins ». « Massacre in Yugoslavia ». From a shooting by some disgrun-
tled teenagers to sports, like the devastating defeat meted out to the Miami Dolphins 
by the Jacksonville Jaguars, to the annihilation of a village in the Balkans, massacres 
seem to be all around us. A search of the word « massacre » on the Internet produces 
at a minimum over 250 000 sites. And therein lay the problem. The concept of mas-
sacre has become so ubiquitous in common and scholarly discourse that it has lost 
much of its analytical utility. The publication of a collection of scholarly essays 
devoted to the massacre in history should, therefore, be most welcome. 
Unfortunately, the essays in this volume only muddy the already murky waters 
about «massacres». While laudably broad in geographical scope, encompassing 
147 
Europe, Asia, Africa, South and North America, and chronological coverage, 
ranging from the Middle Ages to the present, the studies often employ very differ-
ent definitions of what constitutes a « massacre». So in the end, they generate more 
confusion than clarity. Thus, even though some of the essays are of high quality and 
make a genuine contribution, the volume as a whole cannot be judged a success. 
The book contains thirteen case studies and a lengthy introduction by Mark 
Levene. Since there is little thematic unity among the essays, other than that they 
deal with death, the editors have arranged them in chronological order. Some deal 
with well-known historical episodes, like the French St. Bartholomew's Day 
Massacre during the sixteenth-century French Wars of Religion, the 1937 Nanking 
atrocities, and the recent horrors in Croatia. Others attempt to label as massacres 
events that are already well known, like Will Coster's examination of England and 
Robin Clifton's of Ireland during the English Civil War and John Edwards' discus-
sion of violence against Jewish Catholics (conversos) in fifteenth-century Spain. 
While others examine relatively unknown episodes of bloodletting like the Russian 
annihilation of the Circassians, the eradication of the religious Canudos community 
in Brazil, and the German slaughter of the Herero of West South Africa. One paper 
deals with medieval images of a biblical story, the slaughter of the Innocents, and yet 
another examines the near extermination of the wolf in the United States during 
nineteenth-century. 
The very wide range of topics listed above suggests part of the book's problem. 
How can we encompass so very diverse an array of phenomena within the single 
concept of « massacre »? Some of the episodes recounted in the book took place on 
a single day or even a matter of hours, the street riots in Cordoba described by 
Edwards for example, whereas others, like the annihilation of Circassians, tran-
spired over the course of a century or more. Some witnessed hundreds of thousands 
of deaths, as in the Nanking massacre discussed by Callum MacDonald, while 
others accounted for only a handful of fatalities. Some of the slaughters labeled as 
massacres took place during wartime and involved mostly combatants, like the 
cases examined by Coster, and Clifton during the English Civil War, while others 
claimed the lives of common folk during peacetime, like the slaughter of the 
Canudos of Brazil discussed by Robert Levine. Some resulted from state-sponsored 
or state-tolerated actions, such as the German war against the Herero analyzed by 
Tilman Dedering or the Indonesian atrocities of 1965-1966 discussed by John 
Gittings, while others, like the anti-conversos riots recounted by Edwards, occurred 
in spite of official attempts to stop them. Finally, in one of the studies, that by Peter 
Coates on the extermination of the wolf, it is not even human beings who were being 
killed. Utilizing a definition of massacre drawn from these essays would mean that 
massacres are indeed ubiquitous - indeed, even daily - events. Compounding this 
confusion further is that some authors use as synonyms for massacre « ethnic cleans-
ing» «genocide», and even «holocaust». Even as elastic a concept as massacre 
must snap when stretched to encompass the range of events described in these 
essays. 
Levene's introduction, unfortunately, does little to clarify the confusion. While 
recognizing the definitional dilemma and while providing a very useful discussion 
of the issues involved in delineating an analytically precise definition, his essay fails 
to provide one, or at least one that his fellow contributors subscribed to. 
The massacre in history and in the present is a topic of urgent importance. We 
must, therefore, welcome the publication of the case studies in The Massacre in 
148 
History. Individually, they contribute to a better understanding of specific episodes 
of awful bloodletting in the past. At the same time, the lack of a coherent definition 
of what constitutes a massacre and what distinguishes a massacre from other forms 
of killing continues to impair our ability to understand this crucial phenomenon. The 
editors begin the book's abstract by stating «the role of massacre in history has not 
been given much focused attention by either historians or academics in related 
fields ». They are correct. But until we develop an analytical framework that defines 
and delineates the different forms of group lethal violence, I suspect this situation 
will continue. And so, even though this rich collection of case studies adds to our 
knowledge about specific massacres in the past, collectively they do little to clarify 
the massacre in history. 
Thomas W. Gallant 
(University of Florida, USA) 
tgallant@history.ufl.edu 
Ulrich Herbert, (Ed.), National Socialist Extermination Policies. Contemporary 
Germon Perspectives and Controversies, New York, Oxford, Berghahn Books, 
2000,336 p., ISBN 1-57181-750-6 
(Traduction de la version allemande parue en 1998 chez Fischer Taschenbuch 
Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main) 
Prolongeant une série de conférences organisées durant l'hiver 1996/1997 par le 
Département d'histoire de l'Université Albert-Ludwig de Freiburg, ce recueil d'une 
dizaine de contributions rédigées par des historiens allemands de la jeune généra-
tion, affiche sa volonté de dépasser la controverse, désormais «stérile», des années 
quatre-vingt entre «intentionnalistes» et «fonctionnalistes». 
Fortement marqués par les débats ayant eu lieu en Allemagne lors de la parution 
de l'ouvrage de Goldhagen (Les bourreaux volontaires de Hitler: les Allemands 
ordinaires et l'Holocauste, Paris, Ed. du Seuil, 1997), un ouvrage presque unanime-
ment condamné par la profession mais ayant suscité un vif intérêt dans la société 
civile, les auteurs considèrent qu'au delà des simplifications et des conclusions peu 
convaincantes de l'auteur, la question initiale - celle du rôle des Allemands, des 
« Allemands ordinaires » par opposition aux « élites nazies », dans la persécution des 
Juifs d'Europe - demeure légitime et « même urgente ». 
Or pour identifier les motivations des bourreaux, et en particulier ceux des terri-
toires conquis par l'Allemagne comme la Pologne, la France, la Serbie, la 
Biélorussie et les pays baltes, les vieilles interprétations, présentant l'Holocauste 
comme l'aboutissement de la Weltanschauung nazie ou comme le résultat d'un pro-
cessus de radicalisation cumulative, apparaissent peu opérationnelles. 
Ainsi, à la différence de la plupart des travaux antérieurs, les auteurs s'efforcent 
d'articuler la part des circonstances dans la radicalisation graduelle de la politique 
anti-juive avec les tensions résultant du décalage entre la permanence idéologique 
du régime et l'évolution rapide de ses objectifs à court terme. L'attention apportée 
par les auteurs à des champs géographiques particuliers permet, outre de riches com-
paraisons, de replacer la politique d'extermination dans le cadre plus général de la 
politique nazie de conquête et d'occupation de l'Europe. 


Levene (Mark) and Roberts (Penny), (Eds.), The Massacre in History

http://journals.openedition.org/chs/pdf/800

Levene (Mark) and Roberts (Penny), (Eds.), The Massacre in History

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

OpenEdition