A Lynching at Port Jervis review: timely history of New York race hate

Visitors at the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, England examine a 1920s-era Ku Klux Klan outfit from Port Jervis, New York. Photograph: Russell Contreras/AP

Featuring Irish immigrants and the descendants of enslaved Africans in effect set upon each other by the rich, Philip Dray’s A Lynching at Port Jervis covers only 261 pages but is a sprawling book nonetheless.

It details the mob murder of Robert Lewis on 2 June 1892, an incident instantly appreciated “as a portent that lynching, then surging uncontrollably below the Mason-Dixon Line, was about to extend its tendrils northward”.