Suchergebnisse

Murder in New York City dramatically expands what we know about urban homicide, and challenges some of the things we think we know. Eric Monkkonen's unprecedented investigation covers two centuries of murder in America's biggest city, combining newly assembled statistical evidence with many other documentary sources to tease out the story behind the figures. As we generally believe, the last part of the twentieth century was unusually violent, but there have been other high-violence eras as well: the late 1920s and the mid-nineteenth century, the latter because the absence of high-quality weapons and ammunition makes that era's stabbings and beatings seem almost more vicious. Monkkonen's long view allows us to look back to a time when guns were rarer, when poverty was more widespread, and when racial discrimination was more intense, and to ask what difference these things made. With many vivid case studies for illustration, he examines the crucial factors in killing through the years: the weapons of choice, the sex and age of offenders and victims, the circumstances and settings in which homicide tends to occur, and the race and ethnicity of murderers and their victims. In a final chapter, Monkkonen looks to the international context and shows that New York-and, by extension, the United States-has had consistently higher violence levels than London and Liverpool. No single factor, he says, shapes this excessive violence, but exploring the variables of age, ethnicity, weapons, and demography over the long term can lead to hope of changing old patterns

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in the social history of crime an-long a variety of disciplines. This book examines the rapid spread of uniformed police forces throughout late nineteenth-century urban America. It suggests that, initially, the new kind of police in industrial cities served primarily as agents of class control, dispensing and administering welfare services as an unintentioned consequence of their uniformed presence on the streets. This narrowed role hampered their ability to control crime, and, as modern social services developed and the police came increasingly to concentrate on crime control, they acquired a functional speciality at which they had never been particularly successful

Die vorliegende Ansprache des Präsidenten zum jährlichen (achtzehnten) Treffen der Social Science History Association (SSHA) rekapituliert die Geschichte dieser Vereinigung mit folgenden Schlußfolgerungen: (1) Auch Sozialhistoriker können ihre eigene Geschichte prinzipiell nicht voraussagen. Dies zeigt sich z.B. an den kühnen und optimistischen Prognosen in den 70er Jahren zur Entwicklung des eigenen Fachs. (2) Die Entwicklung der Disziplin ist von der Größe und den 'Zufälligkeiten' der jährlichen Treffen entscheidend mitgeprägt. (3) Die Wirkungen sozialgeschichtlicher Forschungen sind eher langfristig und kaum an den eher 'modischen' Schwankungen der Themenwahl und deren öffentlicher Diskussion abzulesen. (pmb)

I am pleased to be able to address this, the eighteenth annual meeting of the Social Science History Association. I have many valued memories of presidential addresses, but my favorite was Jerry Clubb's 1984 talk in the Chinese restaurant in Toronto, where speakers, waiters, and many other patrons all competed in a cacophonic, noisy free-for-all. Jerry did not even try to finish the talk, so we had to wait until it appeared in the journal (Clubb 1986).

The urban crisis of the past decade is placed in historical perspective. Only in the context of the anomalously stable period of fiscal expansion and social prosperity following World War II did it seem like a crisis. Put in a more appropriate and longer historical context, three aspects of the postwar urban era need addressing: urban finance, welfare, and crime. Although troubled, cities are relatively well-off financially, while poverty and crime are social problems that have become urban for reasons other than those associated with any particular urban causal mechanism. All three have followed different dynamics, requiring separate analytic treatment.

Recent Historical Studies of Crime and Crime Control in the United States