Donald Trump and the Ubiquity of Political Violence

In 1970, two historians, Richard Hofstadter and Michael Wallace, published “American Violence: A Documentary History,” an exhaustive catalogue of eyewitness accounts and contemporary reports of riots, rebellions, and assassinations in America, covering more than three hundred years. The kaleidoscopic book examines a hundred and seven episodes of domestic political violence, organized into a handful of loosely defined categories. The Hamilton-Burr Duel, of 1804, is included in Part VI, covering “Personal Violence.” The Los Angeles anti-Chinese massacre of 1871, in which eighteen Chinese men were killed, is included in Part IV, under the heading of “Religious and Ethnic Violence.” The murder of Malcolm X, in 1965, and the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, in 1968, are covered in Part VII under “Assassinations, Terrorism, Political Murders.”