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  • Everyday Crimes: Social Violence and Civil Rights in Early America by Kelly A. Ryan
  • Andrea Stone
Kelly A. Ryan, Everyday Crimes: Social Violence and Civil Rights in Early America (New York: New York Univ. Press, 2019). Pp. 400; $39.00 cloth.

Everyday Crimes: Social Violence and Civil Rights in Early America highlights the multiple contradictions embedded in the colonial and early republican history that produced so many legally dependent people in the “land of the free.” In studies of legal definitions and bottom-up theories of citizenship and its attendant rights, historians and literary scholars have increasingly focused on the everyday. This book concentrates on everyday practices of resistance in which “slaves, wives, and youthful servants” engaged, tracking how these populations understood themselves as rights-deserving citizens.1 Within and across these social statuses, Kelly A. Ryan skillfully analyzes the nuances of these sometimes overlapping, and, other times, discrete subject positions. Theorizing the coherence and divergence of strategies and ideas about resistance and rights, the book demonstrates how legally dependent people shaped rights discourse in the colonial and early republican periods. In this focus, Everyday Crimes resonates with our current time. Published in 2019 and citing the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements, the book reminds us that “[i]t’s no secret that the United States has a problem with violence” (15). It powerfully urges readers to understand both this political and institutional history and the roles of interpersonal power and conflict within it.

The archive the book excavates is vast, examining many case histories, laws, and cultures of print as they reveal instances, or patterns, of resistance to cruelty. Everyday Crimes, an ambitious project, limits its contours by centering the analysis on two locations, Massachusetts and colonial New Netherland—later, New York—and on four methods that people used to resist: seeking allies, reporting cruelty, running away, and employing violence (4). The analysis examines legal and religious documents and records as well as published and private writings, providing many examples of the ways in which everyday acts of resistance, at times violent, had the potential to influence ideas about citizenship and rights and, indeed, often did so. With rich material available from Ryan’s assiduous research, it’s unfortunate that the book holds back from providing more intricate detail of some of the cases and a deeper theorization of violence, citizenship, and rights as the figures presented understood and acted on them.

Divided into three parts, Everyday Crimes first introduces separately the three social categories of legally dependent people that the book identifies in colonial Massachusetts and New Netherland, detailing modes of resistance from protest to arson and murder, with a focus on race, gender, and socioeconomic status in each. The second part analyzes resistance in the context of the Revolutionary War, with the contradictory logic of colonists’ characterization of England as an “abusive parental figure” and the use of legal and extralegal forms of corporal punishment, sexual violence, and murder against enslaved people, wives, and young servants (121). The reporting and publishing of abuses in legal cases and runaway ads indicated enslaved people’s injuries, and depositions detailing cruel treatment and death prompted protests and boycotts toward the abolition of the slave trade (133–34). The third section of the book examines the role of early republican protest and the demand for recognition of rights, at times with the help of white organizations. The New York Society for the Manumission of Slaves, for example, initially rather paradoxically required the people for whom they secured manumission to repay [End Page 1072] the debts the NYMS incurred on their behalf. The formerly enslaved whom the organization helped drew attention to its incongruous logic that valued everyone’s right to liberty, on the one hand, and yet, on the other hand, mandated that liberty come at a price. The NYMS eventually stopped the practice, a shift in the Society’s approach that reflected the influence of those whom they helped (179).

The book, through many examples, demonstrates how legally dependent peoples’ methods of resistance influenced white people’s attitudes about rights. “African Americans played a central role in the radicalization of white antislavery activists [in] [t]aking direct...

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