Summer 1936: Rainey Bethea, a young Black man, is tried for the rape and murder of an elderly white woman. The all-white, all-male jury takes just four and a half minutes to find him guilty. Bethea is hanged near the banks of the Ohio River in Owensboro, Kentucky, with more than twenty thousand white people in attendance. The crowd turns the violent spectacle of Bethea's hanging―the last documented public execution in the United States―into a brutal carnival. Bethea's story came to author Sonya Lea through her family, and it is through her family that she reckons with its truths. At her grandmother's funeral, Lea received an oral history recorded by a neighbor. In its pages, Lea, who is descended from white Kentuckians on both sides, discovered that two of the spectators at Bethea's execution were her grandparents, teenage newlyweds Sherrel and Frances Ralph. Lea's research would also divulge that she was related to the prosecuting attorney for the Commonwealth, the man considered most responsible for Bethea's hanging. American Bloodlines combines memoir with reportage and cultural criticism to interrogate and complicate the traditional narrative about how lynch culture is created in families, communities, and institutions . The essays in this collection grapple with our complicity in these atrocities―including the agreement in our silences―and demonstrate how we, as descendants, might take responsibility and bring new scrutiny to ancestral and communal crimes. "In tracing her own and a nation's lines of blood, Sonya Lea takes readers on an intellectual and moral odyssey. With compelling prose, American Bloodlines clears a path homeward that is lit with loyalty and belonging."―Emily Bingham, author of My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song " American Bloodlines is about more than Lea's ancestors and the past. It is a deep exploration of lynching culture and an intentional examination of the role white womanhood still plays in upholding racist structures that endanger the lives of Black people and other people of color."―E. Gale Greenlee, former teacher-scholar in residence at the bell hooks center, Berea College "In this act of reckoning, this necessary labor, Sonya Lea faces violence directly―in all its bloody forms. Lea's admirable flow of research does not leave anyone she's affiliated with, whether by blood or heritage, to escape the attention of a fine-toothed anti-racist comb."―Davis Shoulders, editor of Queer Communion: Religion in Appalachia "In American Bloodlines , Sonya Lea has done precisely what book-banners, DEI-phobes, and those who thrive on disinformation and ignorance do not want writers, readers, and―in general―Americans to do: interrogated her own family's past tinged with violent racism, stating, Here's what I know―we can ask for the entirety of our communal histories to be told. I want my descendants to know all that happened in our bloodline . If those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it, if we are on a terrifyingly fast track to becoming a people doomed, then voices like Lea's, those who will not comply, who will not roll over into the comfortable privilege of denial but instead insist on history , are an essential part of our collective resistance and any hopes of―someday―our national salvation."―Gina Frangello, author of Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason "Deeply personal and rigorously researched, American Bloodlines is both an interrogation of Sonya Lea's own whiteness and a lighthouse for others who may be nervous about taking on the same work. Lea argues boldly that the shame many of us harbor about our family histories and white privilege is actually a barrier to becoming anti-racist; only when we shed it can we have clear-eyed, compassionate conversations with ourselves about opposing 'the white supremacy that has formed us.' And it reads effortlessly, like an intellectual and moral adventure story."―Kristi Coulter, author of Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career "Sonya Lea has written a courageous, insightful, necessary book―part memoir, part American (and Canadian) history, part reflection on the nature of racism and on what is involved in the work of bringing it to an end."―Priscilla Long, author of Where the Sun Never Shines: A History of America's Bloody Coal Industry "Sonya Lea has given us a master class in weaving research with family narrative. She has created a book about reckoning with personal and cultural legacies of whiteness, white supremacy, and lynch culture that is incisive, insightful, and brutally devastating. Though American Bloodlines: Reckoning with Lynch Culture is a call to radical action, it is also a call to radical love. The book itself is an act of compassion."―Kelly Sundberg, author of The Answer Is in the Wound "In the urgent fight against historical amnesia, American Bloodlines does the heavy lifting