The Daily Bulletin Archive

Manfred Berg, Curt Engelhorn Professor of American History at the University of Heidelberg, will present "Lynching: America's 'National Crime' from a Global Perspective" on Thursday, October 4, at 12:15 p.m. in Classroom Building B118.

In 1905, the American sociologist James E. Cutler called lynching "our country's national crime." Since the 1980s, historians have produced numerous studies of lynching in America in general and of African Americans in the South in particular, but they have only recently begun to put the American experience into a broader international perspective. In his talk, Berg will invoke a global comparative perspective to shed new light on the American practice.

Berg is a specialist in African American history. He wrote the first history of the NAACP in German, which has been translated into English as The Ticket to Freedom: The NAACP and the Struggle for Black Political Integration (University Press of Florida, 2005). He is also the author of Popular Justice: A History of Lynching in America (Ivan R. Dee, 2011).