From the beginning, the story of the United States of America is a violent one. From violence against indigenous people to slavery to armed rebellion to colonial conquests to the Civil War to vigilante violence to violence-enforced residential segregation military intervention around the Western Hemisphere and then the globe to police brutality to gun violence to celebrating the military to assassinations.

Take vigilante violence as an example. I read Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism at the recommendation of a colleague and having read multiple works by sociologist James Loewen. He argues that a significant number of Northern towns and cities had informal sundown laws that prohibited minorities from being in the community after dark with violence implied if the norms were not followed.

Or, take the example of the role of violence in residential segregation. After violence at a South Shore beach set off moreviolence in Chicago in 1919, residential segregation was enforced not just with restrictive covenants and blockbusting and redlining: actions involved bombings and attacks. Historian Stephen Grant Meyer detailed some of this in his book As Long As They Don’t Move Next Door: Segregation and Racial Conflict in American Neighborhoods, a book I read for a class paper. In places like Cicero, Illinois and Levittown, Pennsylvania, violence accompanied attempts of blacks to move to the suburbs.

Photo by Chicago Tribune, July 13, 1951

Or, take the last in the list as an example. The book that really brought this to my attention as a student was Philip Agee’s Inside the Company: CIA Diary. This led me to read a lot about the Church Committee’s work in 1975-1976 as well as assassinations in the United States and ones in which the United States played a role abroad. In several papers, I worked with the idea of assassinations, discovered databases of political violence in countries around the world that political scientists have collected for decades, and found that the political violence rates in the United States are high.

All together, the United States is awash in violence. It is part of American history, it is regularly promoted, and it is often excused or justified. Thinking about some of the examples I noted above, I found out about these through reading and research because these stories are widely taught, known, or experienced by significant segments of the population. Yet, violence is antithetical to numerous aspects of American society and ideals, including the religious beliefs of many Americans, particularly when harnessed alongside other destructive ideologies such as white supremacy or colonialism.