In the years following the end of Reconstruction lynching became a favored method of White supremacist terror in the US South. Despite presidential efforts to quell racist violence in the 1870s, throughout the 1880s, presidents tended to ignore lynchings, and northern newspapers legitimized lynchings as a form of “rough justice.” Over time, however, presidents began to denounce lynchings, and northern newspapers began to argue that lynching shamed the United States before the “civilized world.” Scholars disagree, however, on both when and why the presidency and newspapers began to oppose lynching. We show that the lynching of Italian nationals catalyzed opposition to lynching from both the presidency and national newspapers starting in 1891. Using new data from across the United States, Great Britain, and Italy, we trace the political impact of the lynching of Italians. Lynchings of Italians brought immediate political pressure from the Italian embassy and generated broad international condemnation of the lynching of Italians in the United States. Ida B. Wells exploited this international outrage on her 1894 British tour to draw international attention to the lynching of Black Americans. International condemnation led presidents that were sensitive to their international reputation to denounce lynching, first of Italians, but later of Black victims. Our account dates the rise of antilynching politics earlier than accounts that focus on Ida B. Wells’s British tour of 1894, or the NAACP’s antilynching campaign post–World War I.

This article analyses the roles of the European Parliament and the US Congress in addressing regulatory interdependencies arising in the EU–US strategic partnership. It examines their international actorness as a potential remedy for the problems of democratic participation, executive dominance, and opaqueness in the shaping of transatlantic relations. It shows that legislatures significantly contribute to regulatory discrepancies and trade disputes and that the adverse consequences thereof justify more intensive ex ante cooperation between them. The analysis conducts two groups of case studies to demonstrate how the EP and Congress influence law and policy in areas of transatlantic regulatory and foreign policy divergence. The first group of case studies analyses parliamentary involvement in the making of international agreements (TTIP and ACTA). The second group of case studies inspects legislative action with extraterritorial effects (US Helms–Burton and Sarbanes–Oxley Acts). The article argues that the EP and Congress have so far frequently acted against the spirit of the strategic partnership in ways that are injurious to the interests of the other side, and discusses whether an interparliamentary early warning mechanism could reduce legislative and political frictions and increase the coherence of transatlantic lawmaking.

Differing strategic priorities are only the beginning of the dispute over the International Criminal Court. Americans will not abandon their traditional constitution, as submission to the ICC would require. European states have already subordinated their national constitutions to a German-dominated federation. Americans do not accept international monitors in fighting against evil. Europeans are drawn to relativizing abstractions. For Germans, the ICC promises to “overcome the past,” by licensing German judges to try Americans and Israelis for war crimes. Europeans may feel obliged to fall in step with this latest German project. The US still has the moral self-confidence to resist it.