Adam Rothman is an Associate Professor of History and the Director of Doctoral Studies at Georgetown University. He is the author of Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South.

Critics have carped that Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained is outlandish history, but two new books show that, in fact, Mississippi was even more violent and bizarre in that period. Historian Adam Rothman on a bloody incident of mob justice and slavery.