From its inception, America has been an unusually violent nation. In this compelling book, Elliott J. Gorn tells stories that help illuminate violence in America, how we think about it, how it changes over time, and what it means. A series of portraits in blood - eye gouging matches on the Southern frontier, the murder of the street tough Butcher Bill Poole, the rise of the crime-and-sex scandal sheet, The National Police Gazette, John Dillinger's bank robbing rampage through the Great Depression, the horrific lynching of the young Chicagoan Emmett Till, and the resurrection of his memory during the Black Lives Matter movement -Violent Men demonstrates how racism, gender, and class coalesce to paint a vivid but disturbing picture of our history.