“The Bald Knobbers were practitioners of personal and political killings and assaults who terrorized southwestern Missouri in the 1880s. Numbering in the hundreds, these vigilantes punished wrongdoing as they saw it and inspired an opposition group (with the appropriate sobriquet, the ‘Anti-Bald Knobbers’) before being suppressed at the end of the decade. Matthew J. Hernando has produced what is probably their first critical history and also a commensurate contribution to the history of extralegal violence in an area of the country that might be termed a liminal portal between the New South and the Wild West.”—Journal of Southern History
“A fine book that those interested in the history of American vigilantism, violence, criminal justice, and rural social change will find very useful.”—Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books
“In Faces Like Devils, Matthew J. Hernando provides perhaps the most comprehensive history of Missouri’s most infamous vigilante group, the Bald Knobbers. Exploring both fact and fiction, myth and hearsay, this book paints an accurate portrait of the group that Harold Bell Wright made legendary in his 1907 novel The Shepherd of the Hills. It is an essential work for anyone interested in post-Reconstruction-era Missouri.”—Missouri Life
“With this first in-depth study of the Bald Knobber Vigilantes of Missouri, Hernando brings clarity to the multifaceted Bald Knobber movement, making distinctions between the vigilantes in Taney, and Christian and Douglas counties, who used the same name, operated simultaneously, and inhabited roughly the same compact geographical area. He posits that in order to understand the Bald Knobber movement it must be placed in the context of the Civil War and its aftermath in the Missouri Ozarks.”—Protoview
“Hernando brings clarity and insight to the world of the Bald Knobbers. He makes a convincing argument that what was long considered a single vigilante movement was more accurately two different groups who shared common means but little else.”—Missouri Historical Review