In his appraisal of Lynching in the New South, published by W. Fitzhugh Brundage in 1993, the distinguished historian Numan V. Bartley provided an assessment that many still affirm: “this is the best work ever written on lynching.”Footnote ¹ Bold and engaging, Lynching restored this type of mob violence to its rightful place at the center of the history of white supremacy in the United States after decades of minimization by scholars. Even more ambitiously, it proposed to use violence as a prism through which to examine the New South broadly; to explore race, class, gender, and sexual history; and to illuminate urbanization, industrialization, and the criminal justice system. If, as Brundage noted, “the scholarship on lynching [had] only recently moved beyond its infancy,” his monograph played perhaps the single most important role in advancing the field to a new maturity.Footnote ²

Brundage demolished the widespread assumption that there was some monolithic racism that prevailed for half a century across a vast and undifferentiated Dixie. “Much existing literature on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries dwells upon the static character of white oppression of blacks,” he wrote. “Apparently, the boundaries of racial behavior, once molded in the 1880s and hardened in the 1890s, varied little until the 1940s.” Dismissing as simplistic this perspective, Brundage demonstrated that racism varied substantially over time and space, reconfiguring itself in response to a multitude of variables.Footnote ³ To prove his argument, he analyzed lynching in Virginia and Georgia—representatives of the Upper and Deep South respectively—from 1880 to 1930, comparing and contrasting the levels of violence within each state and between them.

Along with George C. Wright, whose highly acclaimed Racial Violence in Kentucky was published in 1990, Brundage pioneered the geographically bounded state (and sometimes region) study that has become a defining feature in the field, as exemplified by studies on Arkansas, California, Mississippi, South Carolina, the Midwest, the Missouri Ozarks, and the U.S. Southwest.Footnote ⁴ Through his use of maps, Brundage demonstrated that lynchings occurred often in particular areas of the states selected for his study and occurred rarely in others. “Nowhere in Virginia was the incidence of mob violence more concentrated, both in place and time, than in the southwestern corner of the state. The twenty-eight lynchings that occurred there, … reflected the desperation of whites to define the status of blacks in a region where blacks were still uncommon and furious social and economic change was taking place.”Footnote ⁵ Furthermore, as a result of his comparison of the two states studied, he asserted as one of his many findings that “the sheer scale of lynching in Georgia” dwarfed that in Virginia.Footnote ⁶

More than a decade later, Michael J. Pfeifer published Rough Justice, which built upon Lynching but diverged from it in critical ways. With this 2004 monograph and his 2011 sequel, The Roots of Rough Justice, he established himself as one of the most significant of the scholars who reshaped the field at the turn of the century. Indeed, historian Bruce Baker linked the two when he concluded that “Pfeifer is the most important historian of lynching since W. Fitzhugh Brundage began reinvigorating the field.”Footnote ⁷ Brundage himself called Rough Justice “a landmark contribution” and reckoned that “no extant book on the subject even attempts what this one so deftly accomplishes.” In endorsing Roots, he declared that this “work will be foundational to all subsequent scholarship.”Footnote ⁸

In Rough Justice, Pfeifer pursued two major arguments. First, he demonstrated that lynching and the opposition that it fostered constituted a culture war that developed throughout the nineteenth century between supporters of due process and proponents of mob rule. “Postbellum mobs did not respond to an absence of law but rather to a style of criminal justice that was careful and deliberative, ostensibly impersonal and neutral, in which the rights of the defendant, the reform of the criminal, and humanitarian considerations were factored in beyond the punitive demands of communal opinion.” The death penalty today, he showed, constituted a “compromise, in the early twentieth century, of the rough-justice and due-process camps.”Footnote ⁹ Second, Pfeifer conducted a national study that focused on a sampling of states in the Northeast, South, Midwest, and West. Like Brundage, he identified patterns both within and among these states. In Roots, he pursued his argument back through time in an effort to establish the origins of lynching in Britain and the American colonies.

Like Brundage, Pfeifer foregrounded geographical analysis. Eschewing a singular focus on the South, he placed lynching in a national context. Although he selected the states of New York and Louisiana as representative of the Northeast and the South respectively, he focused principally on states in a capacious West, including the Midwestern states of Iowa and Wisconsin, the Mountain state of Wyoming, and the Pacific Coast states of California and Washington. Finding few lynchings in New York but many in the South and West, Pfeifer advanced a persuasive argument that the Northeast made the earliest and easiest transition toward a ‘careful and deliberative’ brand of criminal justice. “Why were lynchings so rare in the mid Atlantic and New England, yet prevalent in the Midwest and West and abundant in the South?,” he asked. He answered the question thus: “The Northeast, from which due-process ideology emanated across the country as an accompaniment to capitalist transformation, anticipated the eventual and uneven transformation of criminal justice in the South, Midwest, and West.”Footnote ¹⁰

In the balance of this essay, I pursue three objectives. First, I interrogate the assumptions undergirding the concept of lynching by Brundage and Pfeifer. Second, I situate these assumptions within the context of the state (and area) study scholarship as it has evolved since the mid-1970s, particularly as it relates to white-on-white lynching and its decidedly racialized and geographical elements. Finally, I ponder the implications of these assumptions for the historiography and offer several suggestions for future inquiry.

Brundage regarded ‘lynching’ as roughly synonymous with ‘white-on-Black lynching.’ Focusing on the South where the overwhelming majority of lynchings were anti-Black, he regarded the term as shorthand for ‘racist violence’ generally. “Lynching,” he argued, “was but one manifestation of the strenuous and bloody campaign by whites to elaborate and impose a racial hierarchy.” Consequently, he viewed ‘white-on-white lynching’—comparatively rare in the South—as an aberration that was not especially significant in its own right but was somewhat revelatory about white-on-Black (for him, normative) mob violence. “The occasional lynching of a white,” he found, “enabled defenders of mob violence to deny the obvious fact that race was central to most lynchings.”Footnote ¹¹ Crucially, Brundage did not regard white-on-white lynching to be ‘racial.’ When mob violence involved struggles over power among whites alone, he regarded it as being “largely divorced from race.”Footnote ¹²

Given his assumption that white-on-white lynching was not racial, Brundage did not mention the race of those involved in ‘frontier’ lynchings, even though whiteness permeated the imagery. “The full tragedy of lynching has little to do with frontier justice,” he wrote, for “if lynching was a national crime, it also was a southern obsession” and “few images of the travail of white-black relations in the South are more compelling than those of baying hounds and armed whites chasing black men across moonlit swamps.”Footnote ¹³ Furthermore, he considered ‘frontier’ lynching peripheral to the real story in the South. Consequently, he assumed that ‘white-on-white lynching’ and ‘white-on-Black lynching’ were characterized by a geographical component that served as shorthand for lynching in the ‘West’ and in the ‘South,’ respectively.

Brundage affirmed these assumptions in Under Sentence of Death. “The charges and countercharges which antebellum northerners and southerners hurled at each other framed much of the subsequent debate over [white-on-Black] mob violence, [but] it was also shaped by images of frontier traditions of extralegal violence,” he wrote. “Enthralled by the adventure and romance of the newly opened West, journalists and adventure seekers before and especially after the Civil War depicted [white-on-white] lynching as an inevitable feature of the conquest and settlement of the frontier.” Having acknowledged but dismissed white-on-white lynching, he returned to the central story:

Conversely, Pfeifer viewed ‘lynching’ as synonymous with ‘white-on-white lynching,’ unless otherwise noted. With his national focus, he grappled centrally with places where many (and in some places, most) lynchings involved violence by and against whites. Accordingly, he implied that a generic lynching was ‘nonracial.’ He contrasted these with “racial lynchings” where whites targeted people of color in the service of racism.Footnote ¹⁵ Although unspoken, he implied that whites acquired “race” when interacting with people of color but remained unracialized—racially neutral—when mingling with fellow whites. Consequently, when Pfeifer discussed white-on-white lynchings, he focused on class identities and relied on his readers to discern the whiteness of the participants. “Working-class solidarity,” he wrote, “provided the crucial ingredient of social cohesion in several Iowa lynching incidents. The posse and mass mob that lynched William Frazier drew its members and its victim from the coal-mining community.”Footnote ¹⁶ Similarly, when he discussed ‘racial lynching,’ he did so almost entirely in chapters devoted to that subject. “In the years before the Civil War,” he observed, “practices of racial lynching became a means for white southerners, midwesterners, and westerners to assert that their regions would constitute a ‘white man’s country.’”Footnote ¹⁷

Also unspoken, Pfeifer suggested that whites become racialized—their whiteness assumes meaning—chiefly when they encounter minorities. In a chapter dealing with unheralded white-on-white lynchings, he did not introduce racial categories until Blacks emerged in the discussion, at which point he began to refer to whites—previously without a racial designator—as whites. “In southern Louisiana’s Sugarland, whites” killed many Blacks, sometimes earning support and sometimes condemnation “from other sectors of white Sugarland society.” As noted, Pfeifer also devoted a chapter to “Judge Lynch and the Color Line: Mobs and Race,” an analysis that focused on the lynching of people of color by whites and, in so doing, reinforced the supposition that the mostly white-on-white lynchings discussed elsewhere in the book were not racial.Footnote ¹⁸

To understand the assumptions that undergirded the scholarship of Brundage and Pfeifer and to appreciate their contributions, it is essential to contextualize their studies within the literature from which they emerged. For the purpose of this essay, that process must begin with a focus on the scholarship produced since Strain of Violence by Richard Maxwell Brown in 1975, a book that did much to shape the assumptions of those who followed.

Brown addressed white-on-Black lynching and other types of racist violence overtly. In a separate chapter, titled “Blacks and Whites in America,” he acknowledged “race” in whites when they were juxtaposed with Blacks. However, he was concerned primarily with white-on-white lynching and viewed class, not racial, analysis as the lens through which to interpret it. “Vigilantism arose as a response to a typical American problem: the absence of effective law and order in a frontier region,” he wrote. “Upright and ambitious frontiersmen wished to re-establish the values of a property holder’s society.” The solution

Although Brown’s examples were all white-on-white, he did not describe them as such. Instead, he regarded them as racially neutral, part of “the vigilante tradition, in the classic sense.”Footnote ¹⁹ Clearly, Brown considered white-on-white lynchings in the West to be the normative form of lynching, the obverse of the tendency among scholars focused on white-on-Black lynchings in the South to regard that type of violence as the normative form. In either case, Brown situated his analysis within a geographic framework, which Brundage and Pfeifer in many ways utilized. Brundage focused primarily on the white-on-Black lynchings associated with his study area in the South and Pfeifer emphasized the white-on-white lynchings associated largely with his in the West. Although Brundage addressed incidents of white-on-white lynching, he largely attributed their importance as cover to deny the racism associated with white-on-Black lynching; Pfeifer addressed white-on-Black lynching separately as a racist permutation, linking it closely to the South and examining it in a separate chapter.

Like Brundage, many of the scholars focused on the South regard ‘lynching’ as synonymous with ‘white-on-Black lynching.’ E. M. Beck and Stewart E. Tolnay called white-on-Black incidents “conventional” and “traditional” lynchings.Footnote ²⁰ Like Brundage too, they considered white-on-white lynching as ‘largely divorced from race.’ When Beck and Tolnay did examine the latter, they assumed that “race was not the issue.” As they argued, “when race did not matter, we must turn to alternative explanations.”Footnote ²¹ Similarly, George Wright characterized white-on-white lynching as peripheral to the real story, something to be acknowledged but not necessarily pursued.

Like Pfeifer, many of the scholars focused on the West regard lynching generically as synonymous with ‘white-on-white lynching,’ wherein the whiteness of both the victims and the perpetrators is apparent but not explicit. Accordingly, they identify the victims not with racial modifiers but as ‘horse-thieves’ or ‘outlaws.’ In addition, they reserve a chapter or two for an examination of “racial lynching,” using chapter titles, such as “Race and Lynching,” and addressing the less (but still very) common use of the lynching of persons of color by whites.Footnote ²³ As a consequence of their assumptions and their study areas, they arrive at different conclusions.

Some scholars of the West cite the fact that the majority of lynchings there were white-on-white rather than white-on-Black, and they interpret this fact as evidence that the West was more meritocratic (and less racist) than the South, an argument so embedded in the American imagination that it scarcely requires elaboration. Genevieve Yost employed it in her 1932 study of Kansas. “The negroes form such a small percentage of the total lynched, a ratio of one negro to four and one-half whites, that the race problem cannot be considered an especially important factor in the state.”Footnote ²⁴ Leonard replicated Yost’s logic in his study of Colorado. In discussing a comparatively anomalous anti-Black lynching, he concluded: “Whether Bainbridge’s race was the deciding factor in his mistreatment would be difficult to prove because whites were also regularly being lynched.” In his chapter on ‘racial’ lynching, he reinforced the geographical assumptions about the lynching of people of color in the South even as he recorded a surge of such violence in Colorado: “Maintaining racial dominance meant much to many white people. Preserving that mastery spawned a multitude of sins, including thousands of racially motivated lynchings—most in the South and fewer in places such as Colorado.”Footnote ²⁵

For Yost and Leonard, the fact that whites killed more whites than people of color in the West somehow proved that they were generally color blind in their selection of victims. Unremarked upon was the fact that people of color there were frequently so few in number and so widely scattered that a limited number of incidents could deliver a fearsome message in terms of lived experiences. Conversely, for scholars examining the South, the fact that whites killed more Blacks than fellow whites somehow proved that they were more racist —perhaps nothing but racist. Unremarked upon was the fact that the Black populations there were frequently so large and widely distributed that a large number of incidents were required to achieve the same effect realized by a handful in the West.Footnote ²⁶

Scholars have long recognized that white-on-white lynching regularly involved mobs representing the monied classes and victims drawn from the poorer classes. Brown made this argument forcefully. “On the frontier, the normal foundations of a stable, orderly society … were either absent or present only in rough, makeshift forms,” he wrote. “Because the main thrust of vigilantism was to re-establish … the civilizing values of life, property, and law and order, vigilante movements were usually led by the frontier elite.”Footnote ²⁷ In their book, historians Howard W. Allen and Jerome M. Clubb confirmed Brown’s argument, writing that the “leading citizens often provided the core and leadership of committees of vigilance.”Footnote ²⁸

Reflecting this class bias, historians tend to sympathize with ‘Western’ mobs over victims in a way that (today, anyway,) they would never do with ‘Southern’ mobs. While most denounce the vigilantes’ methods in the West, they assume the guilt of the victim and, if not extol, then at least justify the intentions of the civic-minded mob. Conversely, historians assume (quite rightly) the innocence of the victim of a white-on-Black lynching in the South and the racist motive of the mob members responsible for it. Matthew Hernando demonstrated both tendencies. “Outlaws preyed on the weak and vulnerable until local residents formed vigilance committees,” he wrote. Soon, these residents “purged the area of most outlaw activity, albeit at the cost of dozens of extralegal hangings.” A few lines later, Hernando reversed the script. “In the South … the demise of slavery removed the central institution” of society. In response, “many white southerners joined groups like the Ku Klux Klan” to restore “southern ‘home rule’ and white supremacy.”Footnote ²⁹

Historians are, of course, correct when they characterize white-on-Black lynchings as racist acts. However, because they do not view white-on-white lynchings as racial and often compare them favorably to anti-Black lynchings, they have too often taken for granted that intra-racial class oppression among whites was not really oppression at all; it was simply justice meted out by common people against self-evident outlaws. To advance their narrative, they sometimes adopt problematic terminology. Brown demonstrated his biases when he portrayed mob members as ‘upright’ and victims as ‘disorderly’ ne’er-do-wells and outlaws. Likewise, wrote Cindy Higgins, settlers banded together to “halt wrongdoing” and “to stop the infestation of roving scoundrels.”Footnote ³⁰ In using emotive names such as these, scholars describe acts of class oppression from the perspective of the oppressors.

In her study of the Missouri Ozarks, Kimberly Harper characterized the region as straddling the West and the South, but she only slightly disrupted the assumptions associated with both ‘white-on-Black’ and ‘white-on-white’ lynchings, and effectively replicated it. She implied the race of those involved in white-on-white lynchings but stated it directly in the case of white-on-Black incidents. “Vigilantism also manifested itself in individual mobs that surfaced when the occasion arose,” she wrote. “But if southwest Missouri, like some midwestern and western regions, had a vigilante tradition visited on both whites and blacks, it also experienced the ‘southern’ conditions that [were] … recipes for racial violence.”Footnote ³¹

This study suggests that historians might investigate white-on-white lynchings from an explicitly racialized perspective—evaluating the ways that whites regulated fellow whites in relation to each other and to people of color, and questioning the motives of the mobs targeting whites as critically as those targeting people of color. As they establish the racial significance of white-on-white lynching, they will then be able to apply their findings and provide new insights into mob violence more generally. In so doing, they may, for example, build upon Brundage’s brilliant but underdeveloped insight that whites demonstrated their racially divergent attitudes through their treatment of Black versus white victims: employing large groups of lynchers against Blacks rather than small ones; killing Blacks slowly—supplemented with torture—and usually publicly rather than quickly and often privately; desecrating Black bodies rather than respecting them; and persecuting all Blacks for the alleged transgression of one Black rather than only the transgressor himself.Footnote ³²

One way to plumb the explicit racialization of white-on-white lynching and to hasten the anticipated insights might be to embrace the contributions made in whiteness studies. Innovators, such as David R. Roediger, Toni Morrison, and Ruth Frankenberg, have urged scholars to consider whiteness not as a natural, neutral, or normative condition but as a construct with profound meaning for a person’s lived experiences and access to resources and rights. Since then, other scholars have consistently pressed several tenets of considerable significance to this discussion. In 1998, George Lipsitz wrote that “whiteness is everywhere in U.S. culture, but it is very hard to see.” White power, he theorized, “‘secures its dominance by seeming not to be anything in particular.’ As the unmarked category against which difference is constructed, whiteness never has to speak its name, never has to acknowledge its role as an organizing principle in social and cultural relations.”Footnote ³³ In 2012, Brian Dirck bemoaned the continued tendency of historians to assume “that only non-white people are people of color, whereas whites are normatively neutral and colorless by definition.”Footnote ³⁴

In 1997, Annalee Newitz and Matthew Wray exemplified the ways that racism could manifest itself among whites. Meditating on the category of white trash, they argued that one way to render whiteness visible is to examine differences within that category. White trash underscores the enmities that bolster “the American myth of classlessness,” they wrote. “Yoking a classist epithet to a racist one, as white trash does, reminds us how often racism is in fact directly related to economic differences.” Americans do not say “nigger trash precisely because ‘nigger’ often implies poverty.” In this sense, “nigger is a term like white trash” because it conflates racism and classism. “Unlike unmarked hegemonic forms of whiteness, the category of white trash is marked as white.” Yet, it is also marked as trash, something “that must be discarded, expelled, and disposed of in order for whiteness” to maintain its dominance. To keep the whiteness of more monied whites unremarked upon, “the whiteness of ‘white trash’ signals something other than privilege and social power.’”Footnote ³⁵

In the case of white-on-Black lynching, whites enforced their domination over people of color; in the case of white-on-white lynching, particular white people sought to enforce their domination over other people within that race. When more prosperous whites lynched poorer whites, for example, they were punishing those whites who failed to achieve the economic wherewithal synonymous with middle-class whiteness, marking them as trash and reinforcing the notion that whiteness was the antithesis of poverty and the key to privilege and power. In addition to these intra-racial class dynamics, whites revealed through white-on-white lynchings important insights into intra-racial ethnic, religious, gender, and sexual relations. Because white-on-white oppression occurred within a particular racial group, scholars should regard it as racial—no more or less so than violence involving whites and Blacks. White-on-white lynching, in other words, should illuminate class, ethnic, religious, gender, and sexual relations among whites in the same ways that white-on-Black mob violence illuminates social relations between whites and Blacks.

“Compared to the attention devoted to white-on-black lynching,” wrote William Carrigan, “white-on-white mob violence has drawn relatively little attention from historians.”Footnote ³⁶ More importantly, it has drawn little attention as a racialized phenomenon because whiteness remains in crucial ways as normative a category today as it was when whiteness studies scholarship emerged in the 1990s, seemingly unworthy of racialized study except in contrast with non-whiteness. In fact, white-on-white mob violence has drawn considerable attention from historians but its racial characteristics—its racial meaning—have gone almost entirely unheralded. Indeed, even more discursively focused lynching studies, including those by Christopher Waldrep and Lisa Arellano, have been haunted by these same unspoken racially and geographically bounded assumptions and by the efforts of their authors to transcend them.Footnote ³⁷

This work suggests that a key reason that Brundage, Pfeifer, and their counterparts in this field make these racially and geographically laden assumptions about lynching is because of their use of the terms ‘race’ and ‘racial’ when, in studying white violence against people of color, what they are really studying is ‘racism’ or ‘racist.’ As indicated previously, when Brundage found that the ‘occasional lynching of a white’ in the South allowed whites to deny ‘the obvious fact that race was central to most lynchings,’ he was clearly suggesting that the whiteness of whites became meaningful—indeed racial—only when they came into conflict with Blacks, people who did have ‘race.’ Similarly, when Pfeifer concluded that ‘race was not always a factor in communal violence’ in the West—he was just as clearly stating that raceless white people were participating in generic, nonracial lynchings.

In using ‘race’ or ‘racial,’ historians of mob violence posit that whites—racialized only in juxtaposition to people of color—responded because of the race of their victims. In so doing, they make the racial identity of the victims the cause of the killing; in reality, the racist motive of the perpetrators is the cause. In this sense, this work underscores my argument elsewhere for the use of the term racist violence rather than racial violence to describe attacks conducted “to maintain social control over the black population.”Footnote ³⁸ By substituting the term racism for race, historians will signal that whites—a group that was always inherently racial—attacked other racial groups because of their own racism. In so doing, they will advance the insights of whiteness studies to corners of the field where it has not yet been fully realized and, thereby, challenge the historiographical whiteness of white-on-white lynching.

To affect a much more comprehensive examination of white-on-white lynching that privileges the racial meaning of this specifically racialized category of violence, scholars should approach the subject with one overarching question: What does white-on-white lynching reveal about class, ethnic, religious, gender, and sexual relations among whites? They might further ask: What were the characteristics of those who composed these mobs? How large were these mobs? What crimes did the mobs purport to punish? What crimes did they not purport to punish? What were the characteristics of the victims? Where, when, and under what circumstances were such lynchings likely to occur? How did white-on-white mobs execute their victims? How did the white population broadly respond to such events?

Let me demonstrate briefly with an example from my own research. In Kansas between 1861 and 1880, white-on-white mobs killed the vast majority of their victims for the alleged crime of horse theft. In just three of 105 incidents did mobs target victims accused of the rape of white women and in two of these three cases they targeted those accused of the rape of children. One mob killed five men accused of raping two young girls, a second killed a man accused of raping a schoolgirl, and the last hanged two men for the alleged rape of a prominent woman, bringing the total to eight white men lynched for sexual assault out of a grand total of 175 white victims killed during that twenty-year period. In the decades that followed 1875 (the date of the last of these three lynchings), white mobs killed not a single white man accused of rape. In other words, white men apparently did not regard the rape of white women by fellow white men as being as consequential as the theft of their horses, surely a significant indicator of the nature of gender and sexual relations among white people. Furthermore, in all three of these incidents, the alleged rapists were strangers of low status, suggesting that their offense was not so much the rape itself as it was the violation of the ‘property’ of local men of higher class and social standing.Footnote ³⁹

Once scholars have analyzed the racial meaning of white-on-white lynching on its own terms, they will then be in a position to compare it in a more sophisticated analysis to white-on-Black and other types of racist lynching. As I demonstrated in This Is Not Dixie, white men in Kansas lynched eight Black men, out of a total of 33, for the alleged rape of white women between 1861 and 1880; notably, they continued to lynch or attempted to lynch many more Black men accused of this crime, well into the twentieth century. “When white men alleged that a rape had occurred, they could be certain of overt public support,” I found. “In order to control black men, white men created what Crystal N. Feimster called a ‘scapegoat in the figure of the black rapist.’ They then widely publicized the threat he posed so that they could control white women.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Having positioned Black men as rapacious monsters and white women as delicate waifs in need of protection, white men set about controlling both, killing Black men and portraying themselves as gallant protectors of white women. At the same time, these white men raped and abused Black women without surcease and with impunity. As hypocritical as the actions of white men appear to be through an analysis of anti-Black violence, they appear even more hypocritical in the context of white-on-white lynching, unwilling apparently to protect white women from white rapists with anything close to the enthusiasm demonstrated to protect them from real or imagined Black rapists.

Scholars who chose to pursue racialized studies of white-on-white lynching will unquestionably shed considerable new light on an important subject which, in Lipsitz’s memorable phrase, remains ‘very hard to see.’ They will also carry forward the scholarly legacy established by the influential works of W. Fitzhugh Brundage and Michael J. Pfeifer over the past quarter of a century.