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Historical Patterns of Interpersonal Violence (Criminology)

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  1. Introduction
  2. A number of definitions of violence have been proposed by scholars, but probably the most widely accepted is something close to the following: the use of physical force intended to inflict injury on others. Throughout the 20th century, historians, political scientists, sociologists, and other scholars have had an enduring fascination with the history of war, state violence, and forms of collective violence, such as riots and rebellions. In contrast, academic interest in historical patterns of interpersonal violence dates from the late 1970s when mainly British historians began to study patterns of homicide and other serious forms of interpersonal violence from the medieval period onward. Since then, research on the nature of, trends in, and patterns of interpersonal violence in a wide range of times and places has flourished. Some of this research is concerned with tracing short- and long-term trends in violence and explaining why the form and frequency of violence vary from one time period to the next. Here the focus is on understanding the social, economic, cultural, demographic, and political forces that shape violence. Other scholars see historical studies of violence as a lens through which to examine the everyday lives of elites and nonelites, including their interpersonal relations and conflicts, habits and manners, sources of livelihood, and leisure activities. Here the focus is on using violence as a means to illuminate other aspects of social life at different points in history. Finally, another group of scholars study interpersonal violence as a way to reveal broader conflicts and relations between the sexes, different ethnic and racial groups, and different social classes in different times and places. Regardless of the focus, all historical studies of violence face such issues as how to define and measure interpersonal violence, how to evaluate sources of information on it, and how to distinguish it from other types of violence. This entry highlights recent and some of the classic research on historical patterns in violence up to the early 20th century. While many of these studies discuss legal and criminal justice responses to violence, popular attitudes toward violence, and representations of violence in different historical eras, work that focuses solely on these topics is not discussed in this entry.
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  4. General Overviews
  5. Although levels of interpersonal violence appear to have decreased over the long term, at no point in human history has any grouping of people, whether small communities or large nations, been violence-free. Walker’s 2001 review article discusses evidence of traumatic injuries from ancient skeletal remains, suggesting that intracommunity homicide and assault were not uncommon in prehistoric societies and cannibalism was widespread. At the same time, this review also shows that distinguishing between interpersonal violence and warfare or state violence can be difficult in human history until the Middle Ages. Some commonalities in violence before and after the Middle Ages can be gleaned from the historical record, as the entries in this section demonstrate. Pinker 2007, in his short but sweeping lecture, summarizes research showing that males have always dominated violence as its victims and perpetrators, and that competition over scarce resources (broadly defined) has been one of the most common sources of interpersonal violence. Both Pinker 2007 and Payne 2004, who also reviews evidence on violence throughout human history, challenge what they term “the myth” that humans have become more violent over time. In the first effort to synthesize the findings from dozens of historical studies of violence in Europe and North America, Gurr 1989 comes to a similar conclusion about trends in interpersonal violence over the last five centuries: interpersonal violence declined from the 15th century onward. Eisner 2003, drawing on a larger dataset, provides further support for this finding and elaborates on Gurr’s work—for example, by showing that the forms, frequency, and technologies of violence have varied greatly over time and place. The collection of essays in Carroll 2007 presents a range of examples from Europe and elsewhere of this variation. The contributors to the Johnson and Monkkonen 1996 volume offer case studies to support the editors’ argument that the long-term decline in violence occurred more slowly in rural areas and regions distant from major population centers. Spierenberg 2008, along with a number of other scholars, attributes both the long-term decline in violence as well as occasional departures from it to the steady but uneven growth of the framework of institutions that make up states, which reduced violence by claiming a monopoly on it.
  6.  
  7. Carroll, Stuart, ed. 2007. Cultures of violence: Interpersonal violence in historical perspective. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
  8.  
  9. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  10.  
  11. A collection of essays by historians on diverse forms of violence—banditry, kidnapping, female dismemberment, serial killing, and more—in European and non-European societies throughout the ages.
  12.  
  13. Find this resource:
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  15.  
  16. Eisner, Manuel. 2003. Long-term historical trends in violent crime. In Crime and justice: A review of research. Vol. 30. Edited by Michael Tonry, 83–142. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
  17.  
  18. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  19.  
  20. A reanalysis and extension of Gurr’s 1989 quantitative work that also includes evidence about characteristics of victims and offenders and an overview of theoretical approaches that may explain the long-term decline in violence in Europe.
  21.  
  22. Find this resource:
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  24.  
  25. Gurr, Ted Robert. 1989. Historical trends in violent crime: Europe and the United States. In The history of crime. Vol. 1. Violence in America. Edited by Ted Robert Gurr, 21–54. Violence, Cooperation, and Peace. An International Series. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE.
  26.  
  27. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  28.  
  29. The first and pathbreaking effort to marshal data from a number of countries and document a massive drop in serious interpersonal violence in the Western world from the 15th century onward.
  30.  
  31. Find this resource:
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  33.  
  34. Johnson, Eric A., and Eric Monkkonen, eds. 1996. The civilization of crime: Violence in town and country since the Middle Ages. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press.
  35.  
  36. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  37.  
  38. The theme emerging from these essays is that the long-term decline in violence in Europe from the 14th century onward began in cities and towns and spread slowly and with fits and starts to remote and rural areas.
  39.  
  40. Find this resource:
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  42.  
  43. Payne, James L. 2004. A history of force: Exploring the worldwide movement against habits of coercion, bloodshed and mayhem. Sandpoint, ID: Lytton.
  44.  
  45. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  46.  
  47. A political scientist reviews the history of different types of violence (which he views as synonymous with force), including various forms of interpersonal violence, and argues that the use of force is on a long-term decline.
  48.  
  49. Find this resource:
  50.  
  51.  
  52. Pinker, Steven. 2007. On the myth of violence.
  53.  
  54. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  55.  
  56. In this lecture, the award-winning experimental psychologist charts the decline of violence from biblical times to the present and argues that we are living in the most peaceful time in our species’ existence.
  57.  
  58. Find this resource:
  59.  
  60.  
  61. Spierenburg, Pieter. 2008. A history of murder: Personal violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the present. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
  62.  
  63. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  64.  
  65. A detailed presentation of historical evidence by one of the main figures in the historical study of violence; Spierenberg attributes the long-term decline in murder to shifting notions of masculinity and honor, and to the emergence and consolidation of the state.
  66.  
  67. Find this resource:
  68.  
  69.  
  70. Walker, Phillip L. 2001. A bioarchaeological perspective on the history of violence. Annual Review of Anthropology 30:573–596.
  71.  
  72. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.30.1.573Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  73.  
  74. A review of bioarchaeological research and evidence showing that interpersonal violence, especially among men, has been prevalent throughout human history; and that no form of social organization, mode of production, or environmental setting has been violence-free.
  75.  
  76. Find this resource:
  77.  
  78.  
  79. Common Theoretical Approaches
  80. Efforts to explain interpersonal violence have focused variously on the characteristics of individuals, the dynamics of interactions, relationships and situations, and the structure and culture of communities, social institutions, and societies. Many of these efforts work within disciplinary boundaries, which can either restrict or enlarge the object of study. For example, criminological theories are directed toward criminal violence, whereas psychological theories tend to be more interested in aggression more broadly, as opposed to violence. Generally, the works featured in this section are attempts to develop trans-historical explanations of interpersonal physical violence, regardless of whether it is criminal or not. Evolutionary psychologists Daly and Wilson 1988 offer a ground-breaking perspective on the most serious form of violence—homicide—and attribute it to an evolved human psychology aimed at maximizing reproductive fitness. In contrast, Scheff and Retzinger 1991 look to the emotion of shame, specifically shame that is unacknowledged, to explain why people throughout history have engaged in violence. For Katz 1988, too, emotions are critical for understanding violence, but in a very different way: People are emotionally seduced into violence by its sensuality and morally transcendent qualities. The microdynamics of violence are also the focus of Collins’s 2008 theory, according to which (and in contrast to Katz) violence is not something people are attracted to; rather, he argues that people tend to back away from or engage in violence awkwardly, fearfully, and incompetently. For Gould, “interpersonal violence is a property of relationships, not persons” and will arise more often between those of equal rank (Gould 2003, pp. xi–xii). Violence, then, is quite often a symbolic contest of dominance and deference.
  81.  
  82. Collins, Randall. 2008. Violence: A micro-sociological theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
  83.  
  84. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  85.  
  86. Like Katz 1988, Collins argues that searching for the causes of violence in characteristics of individuals is misplaced, because most people who have likely backgrounds are not violent, and violent people are not violent most of the time. So Collins, again like Katz 1988, looks for the sources of violence in the microdynamics of situations—in particular, in situations of “forward panic” in which tension builds to a violent climax.
  87.  
  88. Find this resource:
  89.  
  90.  
  91. Daly, Martin, and Margo Wilson. 1988. Homicide. Foundations of Human Behavior. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
  92.  
  93. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  94.  
  95. In this wide-ranging and original review of historical, cross-cultural, and contemporary research on homicide, Daly and Wilson apply sociobiological principles and an evolutionary perspective to understand many aspects and forms of lethal interpersonal violence, including infanticide, spousal homicide, and revenge killings.
  96.  
  97. Find this resource:
  98.  
  99.  
  100. Gould, Roger V. 2003. Collision of wills: How ambiguity about social rank breeds conflict. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
  101.  
  102. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  103.  
  104. Gould argues that violence is rooted in the social relationship between the participants in a conflict; when the relative status of the opponents is equal, ambiguous, or under challenge, violence is more likely to arise as a means to establish dominance in the relationship.
  105.  
  106. Find this resource:
  107.  
  108.  
  109. Katz, Jack. 1988. Seductions of crime: Moral and sensual attractions in doing evil. New York: Basic Books.
  110.  
  111. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  112.  
  113. Using a phenomenological approach, Katz argues that understanding interpersonal violence requires delving into the subjective experience of “doing” violence, in particular, the emergent sensual dynamics that seduce people into “righteous slaughter,” “senseless murder,” street robbery, and more.
  114.  
  115. Find this resource:
  116.  
  117.  
  118. Scheff, Thomas J., and Suzanne M. Retzinger. 1991. Emotions and violence: Shame and rage in destructive conflicts. Lexington Books Series on Social Theory. Lexington, MA: Lexington.
  119.  
  120. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  121.  
  122. Based on an integration of historical, sociological, psychological, and political sources, the theory proposed in this book treats shame as the master emotion. According to the theory, when ignored, shame subconsciously leads to rage and humiliation, which in turn produce violence.
  123.  
  124. Find this resource:
  125.  
  126.  
  127. Data Sources
  128. Sources of data on historical trends in violence include digitized ethnographic data compiled by anthropologists; digitized transcribed testimonies, statements, and other official documents from courts, coroners, and police that are part of archival collections; and quantitative and qualitative datasets personally compiled by scholars from coroners’ inquests, police files, court records, newspapers, pamphlets, diaries, and other sources. The Human Relations Area Files, through its eHRAF World Cultures collection, has digitized ethnohistories for sixty cultural areas around the world, many of which include information on interpersonal violence of various types. However, the research on which these ethnohistories are based does not focus specifically on violence, so the extent of information on violence is limited. The most extensive source of historical data on criminal violence is the recently developed Old Bailey On Line. Spanning over 250 years, it contains the largest body of texts on violent criminal activities anywhere. Even so, the 190,000 digitized pages of proceedings at London’s Central Criminal Court are necessarily limited to one area of Great Britain. Several historians of violence and crime are currently cooperating to build the Historical Violence Database, which provides access to a number of data sets collected by individual researchers from different countries and historical periods. In addition, some historical data sets on violence, most pertaining to North America, have also been deposited by individual researchers at the National Archive of Criminal Justice data. Bienen 2004 has made her own collection of data from the Chicago Police Department available through her website. The generosity of these researchers is laudable; but other researchers using these databases need to be aware of their specific characteristics and limitations to use them appropriately. For example, data sets based solely on official records are subject to the well-known problems with official statistics on crime—such as underreporting—which typically are exacerbated in historical data.
  129.  
  130. Bienen, Leigh. 2004. Homicide in Chicago, 1870–1930.
  131.  
  132. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  133.  
  134. This data set contains the Chicago Police Department Homicide Record Index, chronicling approximately eleven thousand homicides in the city over sixty years in a sequential text file and a quantitative data set.
  135.  
  136. Find this resource:
  137.  
  138.  
  139. eHRAF World cultures collection. Human Relations Area Files.
  140.  
  141. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  142.  
  143. A sample from the larger HRAF Collection of Ethnography, which includes materials on nearly four hundred cultures and sixty macrocultural areas, past and present, from around the world.
  144.  
  145. Find this resource:
  146.  
  147.  
  148. Historical Violence Database.
  149.  
  150. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  151.  
  152. This database includes data sets on homicide and other violent crimes for a number of cities and regions in the United States, Europe, and the Antipodes. For details, see Roth, Randolph, Douglas L. Eckberg, Cornelia Hughes Dayton, Kenneth Wheeler, James Watkinson, Robb Haberman, and James M. Denham. 2008. The historical violence database: A collaborative research project on the history of violent crime and violent death. Historical methods 41: 81–98.
  153.  
  154. Find this resource:
  155.  
  156.  
  157. National Archive of Criminal Justice Data, Interuniversity Consortium on Political and Social Research.
  158.  
  159. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  160.  
  161. This archive contains historical data sets on homicide and other violent crimes in various regions and cities in the United States and elsewhere, collected by different scholars and archived for public use.
  162.  
  163. Find this resource:
  164.  
  165.  
  166. Old Bailey On Line.
  167.  
  168. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  169.  
  170. A fully searchable, digitized collection of Old Bailey Proceedings from 1674 to 1913, including information on 197,745 trials and approximately 2,500 persons executed at Tyburn.
  171.  
  172. Find this resource:
  173.  
  174.  
  175. Methodological Issues
  176. Anyone working with historical data on violence needs to be aware of both the limitations of these data and the methods that can be used to minimize or overcome these limitations. Records on even the most serious of violent acts can be affected by variations over time in definitions of violence and violent crime, in tolerance and acceptance of violence by the public and officials, in political requirements (e.g., pressures to show that serious crime is not increasing), and in technological developments. Typically, such problems have meant that homicides and other types of interpersonal violence are under-counted or sometimes incorrectly recorded. Eckberg 2001 describes a very useful method, initially developed by ecologists, to estimate the extent of undercounting of violent acts in historical data sets. Monkkonen 2001 applies this and other methods to demonstrate how annual homicide rates can be more accurately estimated by using various sources of information. However, some historians of violence, such as Taylor 1998, question whether official statistics on crime can ever be relied upon to adequately document the extent of interpersonal violence in the past. Archer’s 2008 analysis of deaths due to unknown or suspicious causes provides some support for Taylor’s claim. On the other hand, Morris 2001 challenges Taylor’s claims that official statistics on violent crime are manipulated to misrepresent its extent. Some types of violence are more likely to be affected by undercounting than others, such as infanticide and sexual assaults. In their analysis of deaths of newborns and infants, Gartner and McCarthy 2006 provide indirect evidence of the extent of undercounting of infanticides in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and discuss how this may have shaped our understanding of the people who commit them.
  177.  
  178. Archer, John E. 2008. Mysterious and suspicious deaths: Missing homicides in north-west England (1850–1900). Crime, histoire et sociétés/Crime, history and societies 12.1:45–63.
  179.  
  180. DOI: 10.4000/chs.66Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  181.  
  182. A review of mysterious deaths showing that some of those that were likely to be homicides escaped thorough investigation and hence official statistics.
  183.  
  184. Find this resource:
  185.  
  186.  
  187. Eckberg, Douglas. 2001. Stalking the elusive homicide: A capture-recapture approach to the estimation of post-reconstruction South Carolina killings. Social Science History 25.1:67–91.
  188.  
  189. DOI: 10.1215/01455532-25-1-67Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  190.  
  191. A demonstration of how the demographic method known as “capture-recapture” provides estimates of the number of unrecorded or “lost” homicides.
  192.  
  193. Find this resource:
  194.  
  195.  
  196. Gartner, Rosemary, and Bill McCarthy. 2006. Killing one’s children: Infanticide and the dark figure of homicide. In Gender and Crime: Patterns in victimization and offending. Edited by Karen Heimer and Candace Kruttschnitt, 91–114. New York: New York Univ. Press.
  197.  
  198. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  199.  
  200. Data on unsolved homicides of newborns and deaths of infants from unknown, suspicious, or accidental causes suggest that the number of infanticides in late-19th- and early-20th-century Seattle and Buffalo was underestimated and the assumed characteristics of women who kill their infants may be systematically biased.
  201.  
  202. Find this resource:
  203.  
  204.  
  205. Monkkonen, Eric. 2001. Estimating the accuracy of historic homicide rates. Social science history 25.1:53–66.
  206.  
  207. DOI: 10.1215/01455532-25-1-53Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  208.  
  209. Using data from New York and Los Angeles in the 19th and 20th centuries, this paper argues that good-quality estimates of annual homicide counts are possible.
  210.  
  211. Find this resource:
  212.  
  213.  
  214. Morris, Robert M. 2001. “Lies, damned lies and criminal statistics”: Reinterpreting the criminal statistics in England and Wales. Crime, histoire et sociétés/Crime, history and societies 5:111–127.
  215.  
  216. DOI: 10.4000/chs.784Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  217.  
  218. A response to Taylor’s 1998 claim that the statistics put out by the British criminal justice system from the 1850s to the 1960s were consciously manipulated by the executive and its agencies to misrepresent the true incidence of crime.
  219.  
  220. Find this resource:
  221.  
  222.  
  223. Taylor, Howard. 1998. Rationing crime: The political economy of criminal statistics since the 1850s. Economic history review 51:569–590.
  224.  
  225. DOI: 10.1111/1468-0289.00105Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  226.  
  227. An economic historian analyzes the effects that bureaucratic and political controls had on recording, investigating, and prosecuting murder.
  228.  
  229. Find this resource:
  230.  
  231.  
  232. Violence in Classical Antiquity
  233. Mining the historical record for evidence on violence in classical antiquity (c. 7th century BC to 6th century BCE) presents major challenges and renders efforts to estimate accurately how much interpersonal violence took place prior to the Middle Ages nearly impossible. A number of contemporary sources, including the Bible and epic poetry, provide descriptions of specific instances and varieties of interpersonal violence, but not systematic evidence about its extent and nature. Nevertheless, classical historians have drawn from a range of sources to sketch outlines of interpersonal violence in a few societies during this period, while cautioning that distinctions between public political violence and private, personal violence can be difficult to draw. Herman’s 1994 work is noteworthy because it compares estimates of violence in Athenian society with comparable European societies over the ages; he concludes that Athenians were remarkably peaceful by comparison. Cohen 1995 challenges this view and presents evidence that the Athenian law courts did not so much reduce violence as provide new arenas for men’s relentless pursuit of honor through violence. In his analysis of violence in the Roman Republic, Lintott 1999 makes a similar argument. Roman law, he finds, condoned interpersonal violence by applying a broad definition of self-defense, which justified violence in the forms of vigilante justice and private self-help. Harries’s 2007 interpretation of violence in the Roman Republic is consistent with Lintott’s and is based on her analysis of the overlap among conceptions of violence as appropriate self-help, socially unacceptable behavior, and crime. The collection of essays in Drake’s 2006 edited volume acknowledge that the distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate violence were often vague in Roman society; nevertheless, the weight of the evidence in these essays suggests levels of violence in the Roman Republic were relatively low compared to those in earlier Western societies.
  234.  
  235. Cohen, David. 1995. Law, violence and community in classical Athens. Key Themes in Ancient History. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  236.  
  237. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511620300Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  238.  
  239. Based on court documents, this analysis argues that physical and sexual violence were endemic to classical Athenian life, and that prolonged feuds were common both within and between families.
  240.  
  241. Find this resource:
  242.  
  243.  
  244. Drake, Harold A., ed. 2006. Violence in late antiquity: Perceptions and practices. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.
  245.  
  246. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  247.  
  248. A review of evidence about everyday and other forms of violence, which shows that late antiquity was not as violent—especially in comparison to earlier Roman history—as is often believed.
  249.  
  250. Find this resource:
  251.  
  252.  
  253. Harries, Jill. 2007. Law and crime in the Roman world. Key Themes In Ancient History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  254.  
  255. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511620317Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  256.  
  257. An analysis of court records describing how the Roman legal system dealt with crimes, including violent crimes.
  258.  
  259. Find this resource:
  260.  
  261.  
  262. Herman, Gabriel. 1994. How violent was Athenian society? In Ritual, finance, politics: Athenian democratic accounts presented to David Lewis. Edited by Robin Osbourne, Simon Hornblower, and David M. Lewis, 99–117. Oxford: Clarendon.
  263.  
  264. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  265.  
  266. An engaging and accessible chapter that looks at the carrying of weapons, perceptions of honor and vengeance, and the availability of legal redress to support Herman’s claim that Athenian society had relatively low levels of interpersonal violence.
  267.  
  268. Find this resource:
  269.  
  270.  
  271. Lintott, Andrew. 1999. Violence in Republican Rome. 2d ed. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
  272.  
  273. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  274.  
  275. An examination of the roots of violence in the Republican Rome’s law and society that links urban violence to subsequent civil war.
  276.  
  277. Find this resource:
  278.  
  279.  
  280. Violence in Europe
  281. There is now broad agreement among scholars that from the Middle Ages onward, as states formed and extended their reach, interpersonal violence in Europe decreased, albeit not steadily and with some reversals. All of the entries in this section share and provide some evidence in support of this view, with the exception of the Gatrell, et al. 1980 volume, which appeared before most of the major work on the long-term decline in violence was published. What Gatrell, et al. 1980 offer are important discussions of the quality of historical evidence on violence, a challenge to the then-popular view that violence increased with urbanization and industrialization, and discussions of the uneven shift from customary forms of dispute resolution through violent self-help to legal, non-violent dispute resolution. The analyses in the volume edited by Body-Gendrot and Spierenberg 2008 add to the evidence of a long-term decline in violence by examining trends in homicide in different countries. A number of these essays, along with those in the McMahon 2008 collection, argue that historical evidence on homicide provides the most reliable indicator of this downward trend. The McMahon volume also presents recent work by leading historians of crime on topics ranging from ritualized public violence in early modern France to domestic homicide in Famine Ireland. To integrate evidence across regions, time periods, and types of violence, Ruff 2001 draws on the concept of a civilizing process and supports the claim that Europeans became less violent over time. Kaeuper 1999 examines how medieval chivalric codes contributed to this decrease by controlling the illicit violent behavior of knights. Unlike most historians of violence, the anthropologist Blok 2001 organizes his comparative, historical analysis thematically and theoretically to draw global conclusions about the relationship between changing notions of honor and lower levels of violence.
  282.  
  283. Blok, Anton. 2001. Honour and violence. Oxford: Polity Press.
  284.  
  285. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  286.  
  287. An anthropologist explores the relationship between honor and violence in European society, with a focus on the mafia of rural Sicily and on banditry during the Dutch republic.
  288.  
  289. Find this resource:
  290.  
  291.  
  292. Body-Gendrot, Sophie, and Peiter Spierenberg, eds. 2008. Violence in Europe: Historical and contemporary perspectives. Lecture Notes in Mathematics 756. New York: Springer.
  293.  
  294. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  295.  
  296. Introductory essays in this volume deal with historical and contemporary debates over the definition of violence and are followed by four essays on long-term trends in homicide in France, Scandinavia, Ireland, and Belgium.
  297.  
  298. Find this resource:
  299.  
  300.  
  301. Gatrell, V. A. C., Bruce Lenman, and Geoffrey Parker, eds. 1980. Crime and the law: The social history of crime in Western Europe Since 1500. Europa Social History of Human Experience. London: Europa.
  302.  
  303. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  304.  
  305. One of the early and important volumes devoted to the social history of crime and violence, the nine essays consider the reliability of evidence about long-term trends in violence and the changing relationships between violent crime and long-term economic and social trends.
  306.  
  307. Find this resource:
  308.  
  309.  
  310. Kaeuper, Richard W. 1999. Chivalry and violence in medieval Europe. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
  311.  
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  313.  
  314. This vibrant description of chivalry examines how knightly violence, which was rife throughout Europe in the early Middle Ages, was reined in by kings and clergy through the application of chivalric codes.
  315.  
  316. Find this resource:
  317.  
  318.  
  319. McMahon, Richard, ed. 2008. Crime, law and popular culture in Europe, 1500–1900. Portland, OR: Willan.
  320.  
  321. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  322.  
  323. Along with analyses of homicide and its prosecution in various locations and time periods, the essays in this volume offer insights into the circumstances in which people relied on official legal systems as opposed to pursuing justice through private violence.
  324.  
  325. Find this resource:
  326.  
  327.  
  328. Ruff, Julius R. 2001. Violence in early modern Europe, 1500–1800. New Approaches to European history 22. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  329.  
  330. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  331.  
  332. An impressive synthesis of evidence about the history of violence in Europe, this volume discusses patterns in banditry, homicide, assault, and rape along with ritual group violence and organized crime.
  333.  
  334. Find this resource:
  335.  
  336.  
  337. Great Britain
  338. Most of the research on historical patterns of violence has been done by British historians. As a consequence, we have much more detailed knowledge of patterns and trends in violence from the Middle Ages onward and at both national and local levels in Great Britain than elsewhere. Records of criminal indictments from county and borough courts, coroners’ inquests and reports, and parish rolls provide the bulk of the evidence about homicide, neonaticide, robbery, and serious assault. As noted above, these records are not without problems, and each of the entries in this section is sensitive to this. Given 1977 uses judicial and coroners’ records to examine the very high levels of violence in 13th-century England, which he attributes to the widespread carrying of weapons, a military ethos, cheap ale, and the absence of effective law enforcement. Hanawalt 1976 finds that levels of violence also were exceptionally high in the 14th and 15th centuries; her careful case-level analysis suggests considerable consistency over time in the whos, whens, and whys of homicide. Stone’s 1983 article, one of the first efforts by a historian to synthesize evidence from a number of studies, is a convincing challenge to the view of some of his contemporaries that England was more peaceful in the early modern period than today. While not disagreeing with Stone about a long-term decline in violence, Cockburn 1991 suggests the gap between levels of violence then and now may be overestimated, local and temporal deviations from this trend were common, and therefore monocausal explanations for the decline are problematic. Roth’s 2001 article is sensitive to the sorts of difficulties in documenting long-term trends that Cockburn discusses, but suggests careful quantitative analysis can yield reliable estimates of homicides in England from the early modern period onward. In a very different vein, Wood 2004 is less concerned with estimating levels of violence and more concerned with theorizing changes in how it was conceived of and performed in 19th-century England. The contributors to D’Cruz’s 2000 volume take a still different approach, using studies of specific types of violence to provide insight into working-class culture, gender relations, and notions of masculinity and femininity in England in the century before World War II.
  339.  
  340. Cockburn, J. S. 1991. Patterns of violence in English society: Homicide in Kent, 1560–1985. Past and Present 130.1:70–106.
  341.  
  342. DOI: 10.1093/past/130.1.70Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  343.  
  344. An exemplary and widely cited social history of violence in one locality in England that challenges aspects of Stone’s analysis.
  345.  
  346. Find this resource:
  347.  
  348.  
  349. D’Cruze, Shani, ed. 2000. Everyday violence in Britain, 1850–1950: Gender and class. Women and Men in History. Harlow, UK: Longman.
  350.  
  351. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  352.  
  353. A collection of thirteen essays on everyday violence in the home and in public—ranging from youth gangs to pub brawls that emphasizes how gender and class shape violence and the reactions to it.
  354.  
  355. Find this resource:
  356.  
  357.  
  358. Given, James B. 1977. Society and homicide in 13th-century England. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.
  359.  
  360. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  361.  
  362. A detailed analysis, based on records from county courts and coroners, of the nature and characteristics of homicide during a particularly violent period in English history.
  363.  
  364. Find this resource:
  365.  
  366.  
  367. Hanawalt, Barbara A. 1976. Violent death in 14th- and early 15th-century England. Comparative studies in society and history 18.3:297–320.
  368.  
  369. DOI: 10.1017/S001041750000829XSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  370.  
  371. A persuasive analysis of the connection between social, political, and economic factors and violence in medieval England by an eminent scholar and pioneer of social histories of crime and violence.
  372.  
  373. Find this resource:
  374.  
  375.  
  376. Roth, Randolph. 2001. Homicide in early modern England, 1549–1800: The need for a quantitative synthesis. Crime, histoire et sociétés/Crime, history and societies 5.2:33–67.
  377.  
  378. DOI: 10.4000/chs.737Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  379.  
  380. A synthesis of three decades of research on neonaticide and adult homicide that argues for the application of statistical techniques to estimate early modern homicide rates more reliably. Online free of charge at.
  381.  
  382. Find this resource:
  383.  
  384.  
  385. Stone, Lawrence. 1983. Interpersonal violence in English society, 1300–1980. Past and present 101.1:22–33.
  386.  
  387. DOI: 10.1093/past/101.1.22Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  388.  
  389. An important, early effort to synthesize information from a number of studies, this article asserts that England was much less violent in the late 20th century than in medieval or early modern periods. It spawned a lively debate that played out in this journal for some years.
  390.  
  391. Find this resource:
  392.  
  393.  
  394. Wood, J. Carter. 2004. Violence and crime in 19th-century England: The shadow of our refinement. Routledge Studies in Modern British History 1. London: Routledge.
  395.  
  396. DOI: 10.4324/9780203391181Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  397.  
  398. This book traces a shift in the construction and understanding of interpersonal violence in 19th-century England from a customary mentality that condoned physical confrontation in public spaces to a new, “civilized” perspective that championed rationality and self-restraint.
  399.  
  400. Find this resource:
  401.  
  402.  
  403. Other Western European Countries
  404. A number of studies examine interpersonal violence in other Western European countries, either through detailed case studies of particular times and places or through quantitative analyses of more general trends. According to several case studies, violence was an important part of popular culture in the Middle Ages and early modern periods in Europe. As Lacour 2001 states in her analysis of early modern France and Germany, “Everyday violence was omnipresent, not fully criminalized, and prosecuted with indecision. . . While a wide range of mechanisms for peaceful conflict resolution existed, violent self-help was still the most effective means to defend one’s interests” (649). This was as true of the nobility as it was of the marginalized and working classes, as Carroll 2006 shows. He uses the term “vindicatory violence” to describe the use of violence between noble families in France and suggests that the centralized state was not very effective at controlling this violence during the 16th and 17th centuries. Greenshields 1994 finds that the frequent brawls and feuds that characterized life in at least some remote villages in France yielded even more slowly to the state as it extended its reach to more peripheral areas, The absence of a sharp distinction among classes in the frequency with which they used violence also characterized Renaissance Italy. Davis’s 1994 historical ethnography of violence in 17th-century Venice describes how fist fights and mêlées served as entertainment and a basis for wagering for both nobles and the lower classes. Using a more sociological approach, Ruggiero 1980, too. documents the regular involvement of the nobility in Venice in a range of violent activities. LaCour’s 2001 analysis, which covers a longer time period, indicates that the German state was probably not much more successful at restraining men of all social ranks from using violence to defend their property and honor. In contrast to these in-depth case studies, Thome 2010, Franke 1994 and O’Donnell 2005 each combine historical and sociological perspectives and quantitative analysis to examine trends in violence in, respectively, Germany, the Netherlands, and Ireland, from the 19th century on, when levels of violence were much lower than in earlier centuries.
  405.  
  406. Carroll, Stuart. 2006. Blood and violence in early modern France. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
  407.  
  408. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199290451.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  409.  
  410. An examination of interpersonal violence between members of France’s nobility in the 16th and 17th centuries, during which time blood feuds gave way to duels as the preferred way to deal with petty squabbles and matters of honor.
  411.  
  412. Find this resource:
  413.  
  414.  
  415. Davis, Robert. 1994. The war of the fists: Popular culture and public violence in late Renaissance Venice. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
  416.  
  417. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  418.  
  419. A cultural history of violence between artisans and lower-class toughs battling for the honor of dominating certain bridges in 17th-century Venice.
  420.  
  421. Find this resource:
  422.  
  423.  
  424. Franke, Herman. 1994. Violent crime in the Netherlands: A historical-sociological analysis. Crime, Law and Social Change 21:73–100.
  425.  
  426. DOI: 10.1007/BF01307808Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  427.  
  428. The number of incidents and varieties of violent crime—including murder, manslaughter, assault, and robbery—in the Netherlands from the mid-19th century appears to have been relatively stable, although trends in instrumental and impulsive violence are somewhat different from each other.
  429.  
  430. Find this resource:
  431.  
  432.  
  433. Greenshields, Malcolm. 1994. An economy of violence in early modern France: Crime and justice in the Haute Auvergne, 1587–1664. University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press.
  434.  
  435. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  436.  
  437. In this remote mountain region of France, where official forces of law were weak in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, peasants and nobility frequently engaged in violence as a form of private justice and vengeance.
  438.  
  439. Find this resource:
  440.  
  441.  
  442. Lacour, Eva. 2001. Faces of violence revisited: A typology of violence in early modern rural Germany. Journal of Social History 34.3:649–667.
  443.  
  444. DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2001.0017Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  445.  
  446. In 16th-, 17th-, and 18th-century rural Germany, men of all social ranks frequently violated the governmental prohibition on violence, instead resorting to personal, physical means of defending honor and property.
  447.  
  448. Find this resource:
  449.  
  450.  
  451. O’Donnell, Ian. 2005. Lethal violence in Ireland, 1841 to 2003: Famine, Celibacy and Parental Pacification. British Journal of Criminology 45.5:671–695.
  452.  
  453. DOI: 10.1093/bjc/azi015Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  454.  
  455. The decline in lethal violence over the 19th century is attributed largely to a drop in the killing of babies; in contrast, other killings remained high due to the persistence of “recreational” violence between men.
  456.  
  457. Find this resource:
  458.  
  459.  
  460. Ruggiero, Guido. 1980. Violence in early Renaissance Venice. Crime, Law, and Deviance series. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press.
  461.  
  462. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  463.  
  464. An examination of a range of violent acts (murder, assault, rape, and what the author terms “verbal violence”) in Venice in the 13th–15th centuries that finds nobles were disproportionately involved in violence against each other and other members of society.
  465.  
  466. Find this resource:
  467.  
  468.  
  469. Thome, Helmut. 2010. Violent crime (and suicide) in Imperial Germany, 1883–1902: Quantitative analyses and a Durkheimian interpretation. International Criminal Justice Review 20.1:5–34.
  470.  
  471. DOI: 10.1177/1057567709360334Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  472.  
  473. A significant reduction in violent crime in Germany in the latter part of the 19th century is documented and explained by reference to Durkheim’s work on the erosion of collectivism.
  474.  
  475. Find this resource:
  476.  
  477.  
  478. Scandinavia, Russia, and the Baltic Region
  479. Historical research on violence in other parts of Europe is less extensive than that in Great Britain, France, Italy, and Germany, and most of the work available in English uses a quantitative approach. Jansson 1998 both documents a decline in violence in 17th-century Sweden and offers insight into a type of violence —suicidal murder—that was distinctive to that period. Kaspersson’s 1999 analysis complements this by providing a more statistically based study that compares levels of and trends in violence in Sweden with those in other countries. In Finland, levels of and trends in violence have differed from the rest of Scandinavia for some time, and this serves as a starting point for the research by Savolainen, et al. 2008, who offer an explanation for this difference. The Ylikangas, et al. 2001 collection provides additional statistically based evidence about long-term trends in violence in Scandinavia as well as the Baltic region. Stickley and Pridemore 2007’s article is a good example of a quantitative, causal-modeling approach to historical patterns in violence; it offers an explanation for the social distribution of homicide in early-20th-century Russia.
  480.  
  481. Jansson, Arne. 1998. From swords to sorrow: Homicide and suicide in early modern Stockholm. Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, Stockholm Studies in Economic History 30. Stockholm, Sweden: Almqvist and Wiksell.
  482.  
  483. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  484.  
  485. This book provides evidence that homicide began to decline in Sweden during the 17th century and discusses the early modern phenomenon of suicidal murder. Suicidal murders were committed by suicidal persons who killed to be executed, because suicide was a greater sin than killing another and then dying by execution.
  486.  
  487. Find this resource:
  488.  
  489.  
  490. Kaspersson, Maria. 1999. Dödligt våld I Sverige och andra europeiska länder 1500–1800. [Deadly violence in Sweden and other European countries 1500–1800.] Nordisk tids kriminalvidenskab 86.2:117–136.
  491.  
  492. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  493.  
  494. A thorough overview of statistical data on homicide in early modern Sweden, with comparisons to other countries.
  495.  
  496. Find this resource:
  497.  
  498.  
  499. Savolainen, Jukka, Martti Lehti, and Janne Kivivuori. 2008. Historical origins of a cross-national puzzle: Homicide in Finland, 1750 to 2000. Homicide Studies 12.1:67–89.
  500.  
  501. DOI: 10.1177/1088767907311850Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  502.  
  503. The trend in Finnish homicides diverged from that of other European countries in the mid-19th century; this and Finland’s higher rates of homicide are said to be attributable to its “drinking culture” among males.
  504.  
  505. Find this resource:
  506.  
  507.  
  508. Ylikangas, Heikke, Petri Karonen, and Martti Lehti, eds. 2001. Five centuries of violence in Finland and the Baltic area. History of Crime and Criminal Justice. Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press.
  509.  
  510. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  511.  
  512. Three lengthy essays provide statistical data and criminal case histories ranging over several centuries in Finland, Sweden, and Estonia.
  513.  
  514. Find this resource:
  515.  
  516.  
  517. Stickley, Andrew, and William A. Pridemore. 2007. The Social-Structural Correlates of Homicide in Late-Tsarist Russia. British Journal of Criminology 47.1: 80–99.
  518.  
  519. DOI: 10.1093/bjc/azl033Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  520.  
  521. An analysis showing the relationship between heavy drinking, population density, literacy, and homicide in fifty provinces of European Russia in 1910.
  522.  
  523. Find this resource:
  524.  
  525.  
  526. Violence in the United States and North America
  527. One of the reasons for the extensive historical work on interpersonal violence in what is now the United States is the relatively high levels of lethal violence there compared to most European countries. Serious and sustained scholarly interest in violence in America emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when homicide rates in the United States were skyrocketing and Americans—the public, its leaders, and scholars—began searching for explanations. Brown 1975 was among the first to address the question of why the United States was and is so violent through a sweeping historical analysis. Based largely on his own research, Brown argued that the country’s history imprinted a propensity toward violence on its citizens; his analysis set the stage for subsequent research and debates over the historical origins of American violence. More than two decades later, Lane 1997, another highly regarded historian of violence, synthesized findings from hundreds of studies in a chronologically based narrative history of murder in America. Using a similar approach, Roth’s 2009 analysis turns away from more culturally based accounts of American violence and instead links political factors, such as political instability and lack of governmental legitimacy, to the country’s high rates of homicide. The essays in the Bellesiles 1999 volume focus on particular violent acts and actors to show how race and gender have shaped the history of violence in America. A number of scholars have commented on the vast regional variations in American violence, especially the difference between the less violent north and the more violent south. Redfield’s 2000 recently re-issued book is an early and classic analysis of this difference. Historically, the American West has also had higher rates of violence, the origins of which Peterson del Mar 2002 explores in his research. Historical analyses of interpersonal violence—as opposed to state or collective violence—in other parts of North America are less common. Taylor’s 1979 detailed examination of the role of alcohol in historical patterns of homicide in Mexico is a notable exception. Knafla 1995 offers a more thematic overview of violence on the western Canadian frontier, which provides insights into current Canadian-American differences in violence.
  528.  
  529. Bellesiles, Michael A., ed. 1999. Lethal imagination: Violence and brutality in American history. New York: New York Univ. Press.
  530.  
  531. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  532.  
  533. Twenty essays, most of which examine specific violent actors or victims—including a female serial killer, a mutually violent married couple, a girl who was repeatedly raped by her father—to draw more general conclusions about the nature of violence in 18th-, 19th-, and early-20th-century United States.
  534.  
  535. Find this resource:
  536.  
  537.  
  538. Brown, Richard Maxwell. 1975. Strain of violence: Historical studies of American violence and vigilantism. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
  539.  
  540. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  541.  
  542. One of the most esteemed historians of American violence presents a series of essays on what he characterizes as distinctive aspects of violence in American, such as its history of vigilantism.
  543.  
  544. Find this resource:
  545.  
  546.  
  547. Knafla, Louis A. 1995. Violence on the western Canadian frontier: A historical perspective. In Violence in Canada: Socio-political perspectives. Edited by Jeffrey Ian Ross, 11–39. Don Mills, ON: Oxford Univ. Press.
  548.  
  549. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  550.  
  551. A survey of various forms of violence in western Canada from the early 19th century, which finds both similarities to and differences from the levels and types of violence on the US frontier.
  552.  
  553. Find this resource:
  554.  
  555.  
  556. Lane, Roger. 1997. Murder in America: A history. The History of Crime and Criminal Justice series. Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press.
  557.  
  558. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  559.  
  560. A comprehensive analysis of criminal homicide in the United States from colonial times to the present that discusses a range of factors—economic, political, cultural, demographic—behind rising and falling murder rates and that implicates America’s gun culture in its high rates of homicide.
  561.  
  562. Find this resource:
  563.  
  564.  
  565. Peterson del Mar, David. 2002. Beaten down: A history of violence in the West. Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press.
  566.  
  567. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  568.  
  569. An examination and comparison of interpersonal violence in British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon from the first contact between whites and Native Americans to the 20th century.
  570.  
  571. Find this resource:
  572.  
  573.  
  574. Redfield, Horace V. 2000. Homicide, north and south: Being a comparative view of crime against the person in several parts of the United States. History of Crime and Criminal Justice series. Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press. Originally published in 1880 in Philadelphia by J. P. Lippincott.
  575.  
  576. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  577.  
  578. The first systematic analysis of regional differences in violence in the United States, this book uses multiple sources of data to examine intra- and interracial violence and argues that high rates of violence in the American south are a consequence of both custom and culture. Originally published in 1880.
  579.  
  580. Find this resource:
  581.  
  582.  
  583. Roth, Randolph. 2009. American homicide. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
  584.  
  585. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  586.  
  587. Another analysis of American homicide from colonial times to the present, this one focuses on homicides among adults and explains patterns in these by reference to attitudes toward the government, strength of ties to communities, and opportunities to earn respect without resorting to violence.
  588.  
  589. Find this resource:
  590.  
  591.  
  592. Taylor, William B. 1979. Drinking, homicide and rebellion in colonial Mexican villages. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.
  593.  
  594. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  595.  
  596. An analysis of the role of alcohol in homicide and other forms of violence by indigenous peoples and their Spanish conquerors.
  597.  
  598. Find this resource:
  599.  
  600.  
  601. Case Studies of Specific Times and Places
  602. Case studies of violence in America in particular times and places illustrate both distinctive differences among regions or between rural and urban areas and patterns common to many settings. Major cities of the United States have been the focus of some of the most important of these case studies. Philadelphia is the site for a number of studies by Lane, the most prominent being Lane 1999, which features two chapters detailing the characteristics of homicides in that city between 1839 and 1901. The most extensive longitudinal study of homicide in an American city is Monkkonen 2001, which spans two centuries, draws on a wide range of sources, and describes how age, ethnicity, weapons, and demography shaped murder in New York City. Adler’s 2006 research on Chicago covers a shorter but critical time period, when that city was known as the most violent one in the world and its homicides reflected a changing industrial order and class structure. Shifting the focus to rural and less urbanized areas, Vandal 2000 and McKanna 2002 each examine parts of the country known for their high rates of violence: Louisiana immediately after the Civil War and California in the last half of the 19th century. Both books also focus on race and ethnic differences in homicide as well as in the responses to it and in so doing point to the distinctive racial dimension of violence in American history.
  603.  
  604. Adler, Jeffrey. 2006. First in violence, deepest in dirt: Homicide in Chicago, 1875–1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
  605.  
  606. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  607.  
  608. A comprehensive analysis of the extent and characteristics of homicides in Chicago that shows how certain types of homicide that dominated the late 19th century city went out of fashion and were replaced by other types of homicide in the early 20th century.
  609.  
  610. Find this resource:
  611.  
  612.  
  613. Lane, Roger. 1999. Violent death in the city: Suicide, accident and murder in 19th-century Philadelphia. 2d ed. Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press
  614.  
  615. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  616.  
  617. An analysis of the relationship between urbanization and violent death by one of the premier historians of American violence, this book finds that the homicide rate in Philadelphia decreased as the city grew.
  618.  
  619. Find this resource:
  620.  
  621.  
  622. McKanna, Clare V. 2002. Race and homicide in 19th-century California. Wilbur S. Shepperson Series in History and Humanities. Reno: Univ. of Nevada Press.
  623.  
  624. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  625.  
  626. In this examination of over thirteen hundred homicides over fifty years in seven California counties, differences in lethal violence by Native Americans, Chinese, Hispanics, and whites are related to cultural differences among the ethnic groups.
  627.  
  628. Find this resource:
  629.  
  630.  
  631. Monkkonen, Eric. 2001. Murder in New York City. Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California.
  632.  
  633. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  634.  
  635. The definitive treatment of the extent and nature of homicide in the nation’s largest city during the 19th and 20th centuries, this book considers patterns by sex, age, ethnic, and racial groups. [ISBN: 9780520221888]
  636.  
  637. Find this resource:
  638.  
  639.  
  640. Vandal, Gilles. 2000. Rethinking southern violence: Homicide in post–Civil War Louisiana, 1866–1884. History of Crime and Criminal Justice series. Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press.
  641.  
  642. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  643.  
  644. Based on an analysis of almost five thousand homicides in rural and urban Louisiana, this book finds that white southerners were more violent than recently freed black southerners in the two decades after the Civil War.
  645.  
  646. Find this resource:
  647.  
  648.  
  649. Violence in Non-Western Societies
  650. Historical and cross-cultural studies of interpersonal violence provide important insights into both its ubiquitous nature and variations in its specific manifestations. While human history provides no evidence of violence-free societies, some have been much more violent than others at various points in their histories. Rowe’s 2007 careful history of one very violent region in China over seven centuries supports other historians’ findings that areas more distant from state authority are likely to be particularly cruel and conflictual. At the same time, as Buoye’s 2000 study shows, when the state brings new institutions and economic practices into peripheral areas, these may clash with more customary practices, producing higher levels of violence. Studies of colonial societies show a similar pattern. Rogers 1987 finds that the legal procedures and institutions the British brought to Sri Lanka reflected an inadequate understanding of cultural differences and indirectly encouraged violence as a consequence. The abuse of power that typically accompanies colonialism has also generated violence more directly, as Wiener 2009 demonstrates in his analysis of a number of colonial societies. Other studies of violence in non-Western societies, such as those presented in the Ahluwalia, et al. 2007 and Thakur 1978 volumes, are useful for identifying cultural universals and cultural particularities in interpersonal violence.
  651.  
  652. Ahluwalia, Pal, Louise Bethlehem, and Ruth Ginio, eds. 2007. Violence and non-violence in Africa. Routledge Advances in International Relations and Global Politics 54. London: Routledge.
  653.  
  654. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  655.  
  656. The eleven essays in this collection focus on violent crime, homicide, and vigilantism in diverse historical periods ranging from 14th-century Ethiopia to early-20th-century Cameroon.
  657.  
  658. Find this resource:
  659.  
  660.  
  661. Buoye, Thomas. 2000. Manslaughter, markets and moral economy: Violent disputes over property rights in 18th-century China. Cambridge Studies in Chinese History, Literature, and Institutions. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  662.  
  663. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511551345Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  664.  
  665. This analysis of 630 homicides arising from contractual and noncontractual disputes argues that the frustrations of a rural society were increasingly expressed through violence, as rising population pressure and property values eroded traditional norms and customs.
  666.  
  667. Find this resource:
  668.  
  669.  
  670. Rogers, John D. 1987. Crime, justice and society in colonial Sri Lanka. London Studies on South Asia 5. London: Curzon.
  671.  
  672. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  673.  
  674. One chapter of this book is devoted to murder during the mature colonial period (1865–1905) and finds that it was far from a crime dominated by members of the lower castes.
  675.  
  676. Find this resource:
  677.  
  678.  
  679. Rowe, William T. 2007. Crimson rain: Seven centuries of violence in a Chinese county. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.
  680.  
  681. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  682.  
  683. An account of various forms of violence from the 14th century onward in a particularly violent locality in northern China.
  684.  
  685. Find this resource:
  686.  
  687.  
  688. Thakur, Upendra. 1978. An introduction to homicide in India: Ancient and early medieval periods. New Delhi: Abhinav Publications.
  689.  
  690. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  691.  
  692. A sweeping overview of various types of homicide—including Brahmanicide and human sacrifice—in the different religions and societies that made up India for more than a millennium.
  693.  
  694. Find this resource:
  695.  
  696.  
  697. Wiener, Martin J. 2009. An empire on trial: Race, murder and justice under British rule, 1870–1935. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  698.  
  699. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  700.  
  701. Interracial homicides and their prosecutions in seven British colonies—including Fiji, India, Kenya, Trinidad, and Queensland—are examined to show the importance of crime and criminal justice for the history of empire.
  702.  
  703. Find this resource:
  704.  
  705.  
  706. Men, Masculinities and Violence
  707. As Wiener 2004 states, “all settled societies, past and present, have been faced with the twin tasks of putting to use and reining in” males’ propensities to violence. Generally, they have been relatively effective at doing so. The long-term decline in violence described earlier appears to be due primarily to a drop in public and ritualized forms of violence among males, as the essays in Spierenberg 1998 and the article by Shoemaker 2001 demonstrate. For this reason, as these and the other works in this section argue, the “civilizing process” can be seen as highly gendered; in other words, its most obvious effects were on male behavior and on the stigmatization of their physical aggression. Shoemaker 2001 provides a detailed analysis of violence in 18th-century London that suggests men’s public displays of violence decreased especially dramatically as notions about masculinity changed. In a more sweeping and thematically organized survey of men’s violence in England, Emsley 2005 emphasizes how particularly English notions about masculinity encouraged ever greater self-restraint and thus less male violence from the 18th century on. Ironically, one result of this was more arrests of males for violent crimes in the 19th century, according to Wiener 2004, precisely because the public and the criminal justice system had much less tolerance for male violence. In contrast, Courtwright’s 1996 study of the American frontier attributes the decline in violence there not to changing notions of masculinity, but to demographic change. The American frontier was a bachelor society that engendered violence by bringing together lots of young, single males; with settlement of the frontier came family formation, which reined in male violence.
  708.  
  709. Courtwright, David T. 1996. Violent land: Single men and social disorder from the frontier to the inner city. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
  710.  
  711. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  712.  
  713. A series of case studies of violence from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century linked by the theme that the relationship between physical aggression and single manhood is reinforced by American culture.
  714.  
  715. Find this resource:
  716.  
  717.  
  718. Emsley, Clive. 2005. Hard men: The English and violence since 1750. London: Hambledon and London.
  719.  
  720. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  721.  
  722. A prominent historian of British crime explores male violence in a variety of settings including city streets, the home, immigrant neighborhoods, and sporting venues.
  723.  
  724. Find this resource:
  725.  
  726.  
  727. Shoemaker, Robert. 2001. Male honour and the decline of public violence in 18th-century London. Social history 26.2:190–208.
  728.  
  729. DOI: 10.1080/03071020110041352Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  730.  
  731. The dramatic decline in homicides in 18th-century London is shown to have resulted from a drop in public violence among men, which in turn is linked to changing notions of English masculinity.
  732.  
  733. Find this resource:
  734.  
  735.  
  736. Spierenberg, Pieter, ed. 1998. Men and violence: Gender, honor and rituals in modern Europe and America. History of Crime and Criminal Justice series. Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press.
  737.  
  738. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  739.  
  740. Nine essays by well-known historians of crime discuss the connections between manhood and violence in a variety of 18th- and 19th-century settings.
  741.  
  742. Find this resource:
  743.  
  744.  
  745. Wiener, Martin. 2004. Men of blood: Violence, manliness and criminal justice in Victorian England. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  746.  
  747. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511511547Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  748.  
  749. A quantitative and qualitative analysis of several thousand homicide and rape trials that links changing conceptions of masculinity to changes in the nature of and legal reactions to violent crime.
  750.  
  751. Find this resource:
  752.  
  753.  
  754. Women and Violence
  755. Although males have always been the dominant actors in interpersonal violence, females have played a critical role as both perpetrators and targets of violence. The popular view that violence involving females is relatively rare and largely private violence, carried out within families and in the home, is generally true historically. But, as Kilday 2008 shows in her study of Enlightenment Scotland, there are notable exceptions to this pattern; she finds that in the late 18th and early 19th centuries Scottish women engaged in violence with more frequency and ferocity than did women in England and Europe and were prosecuted for it similarly to men. Much of the historical literature on women and violence is interested not only in documenting female violence but also in determining the extent to which it differed from violence by men and whether it was responded to differently by the legal system and the public. Rublack’s 1999 study of early modern Germany is one of many suggesting that both women and men often engaged in violence to survive, although the specific forms of violence they used were gendered. Similarly Allen’s 1990 analysis of the crimes of Australian women from the late 19th century on argues that their violence was fundamentally and differentially shaped by a highly gendered social order. In a departure from this line of argument, Hurl-Eamon’s 2005 contends that petty violence was shaped very little by gender, at least in 17th- and 18th- century London. For evidence that violent women were treated more leniently than men in some times and places but not others, Martin’s 2008 research on early modern England and Conley’s 2007 on the British Isles in the late–19th century are good sources. Gross’s 2006 analysis of the violence of black women in Philadelphia effectively demonstrates that gender may be less important in shaping women’s violence and responses to it than race. As all of these works show, understanding the variety of roles women have played in interpersonal violence throughout history provides important insights into changes in relations between the sexes, notions of femininity, and the extent and nature of women’s participation in public and private life.
  756.  
  757. Allen, Judith A. 1990. Sex and secrets: Crimes involving Australian women since 1880. Melbourne, Australia: Oxford Univ. Press.
  758.  
  759. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  760.  
  761. Crimes by and against women—such as infanticide, sexual assault, spouse murder—are the focus of this book, which offers a feminist analysis of their political and social significance.
  762.  
  763. Find this resource:
  764.  
  765.  
  766. Conley, Carolyn A. 2007. Certain other countries: Homicide, gender and national identity in late 19th-century England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. History of Crime and Criminal Justice. Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press.
  767.  
  768. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  769.  
  770. A comparative analysis of homicides of and by women (and men), and the legal responses to them, between 1867 and 1892, that sheds light on contemporary attitudes of gender, social class, and nationality.
  771.  
  772. Find this resource:
  773.  
  774.  
  775. Gross, Kali. 2006. Colored Amazons: Crime, violence and black women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880–1910. Politics, History, and Culture. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
  776.  
  777. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  778.  
  779. Based primarily on records from Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, this book uses the crimes of black women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a means to trace a social and cultural history of race.
  780.  
  781. Find this resource:
  782.  
  783.  
  784. Hurl-Eamon, Jennine. 2005. Gender and petty violence in London, 1680–1720. History of Crime and Criminal Justice series.Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press.
  785.  
  786. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  787.  
  788. By focusing on relatively minor aggressive acts rather than serious violence, this analysis makes a unique contribution to the study of gender and violence at the same time that it argues that the gendered nature of violence has been overstated.
  789.  
  790. Find this resource:
  791.  
  792.  
  793. Kilday, Ann-Marie. 2008. Women and violent crime in Enlightenment Scotland. Woodbridge, UK: Royal Historical Society.
  794.  
  795. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  796.  
  797. This analysis of female homicide, infanticide, assault, and robbery in Scotland between 1750 and 1830 finds that Scottish women were more violent and were punished more harshly than their contemporaries in England and most parts of continental Europe.
  798.  
  799. Find this resource:
  800.  
  801.  
  802. Martin, Randall. 2008. Women, murder and equity in early modern England. Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 10. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
  803.  
  804. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  805.  
  806. A picture of women, murder, and the social construction of these crimes is drawn on the basis of more than a hundred printed trial and execution reports as well as personal narratives from 17th-century England.
  807.  
  808. Find this resource:
  809.  
  810.  
  811. Rublack, Ulinka. 1999. The crimes of women in early modern Germany. Oxford Studies in Social History. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
  812.  
  813. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  814.  
  815. Chapters on infanticide, marital violence, and spouse killing give glimpses into the lives of ordinary women and how they experienced and managed authority and sexuality.
  816.  
  817. Find this resource:
  818.  
  819.  
  820. Types of Interpersonal Violence
  821. Interpersonal violence takes a number of different forms, many of which have distinctive historical patterns, motivations, and public reactions. The long- and short-term trends described earlier are largely attributable to fluctuations in violence between males, but may not characterize other types of interpersonal violence. This is one of the reasons it is important to study different manifestations of violence. Studies of different types of interpersonal violence also can provide historical insight into particular types of human relationships and social interactions.
  822.  
  823. Infanticide
  824. As Roth 2001 points out, “historians often despair of their ability to write histories of child murder, because the crime was easy to commit and conceal” (101). The fact that the killing of newborns at times has been tolerated and even condoned by legal systems and the broader public, as Mungello 2008’s study of China and the essays in Jackson’s 2002 collection illustrate, increases the difficulty of determining historical patterns in the extent and nature of infanticide. The studies of infanticide by Hoffer and Hull 1981 and Roth 2001 acknowledge these problems but provide surprisingly consistent evidence about trends in infanticide and legal responses to it in New England over three centuries. Ferraro’s 2008 case study of Venice from the mid-16th century to the mid-18th century is a fine example of how careful analysis can reveal unexpected patterns, such as the extensive involvement of men in infanticide. Taken together the evidence from these studies indicates that infanticide varied considerably over time and place, but that it probably reached its lowest levels by the early 20th century as knowledge about the reproductive process grew and more effective techniques of abortion and birth control developed. Regardless of historical period, most studies identify the stigma of illegitimacy, poverty, social isolation, and mental illness as the most important reasons for infanticide. Altink 2007 (355), in her study of infanticide in Jamaica from the late 19th century onward, extends this list to include “societal ideas about female sexual behavior and motherhood.”
  825.  
  826. Altink, Henice. 2007. “I did not want to face the shame of exposure”: Gender ideologies and child murder in post-emancipation Jamaica. Journal of Social History 41.2:355–387.
  827.  
  828. DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2008.0025Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  829.  
  830. Important insights into a society’s gender ideologies can be gained by studying infanticide, as this study demonstrates in its analysis of the influence of the colonial elite’s ideas about womanhood on the decisions of lower-class African Jamaican women to kill their newborns and infants.
  831.  
  832. Find this resource:
  833.  
  834.  
  835. Ferraro, Joanne M. 2008. Nefarious crimes, contested justice: Illicit sex and infanticide in the Republic of Venice, 1557–1789. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.
  836.  
  837. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  838.  
  839. Infanticides resulting from rape and incest in early modern Venice are documented to show that infanticide at the time was as much a man’s as a woman’s crime.
  840.  
  841. Find this resource:
  842.  
  843.  
  844. Hoffer, Peter C., and N. E. H. Hull. 1981. Murdering mothers: Infanticide in England and New England, 1558–1803. New York University School of Law Series in Legal History 2. New York: New York Univ. Press.
  845.  
  846. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  847.  
  848. An important comparative and quantitative perspective on social change, child murder, and legal and community responses to it over three centuries.
  849.  
  850. Find this resource:
  851.  
  852.  
  853. Jackson, Mark, ed. 2002. Infanticide: Historical perspectives on child murder and concealment, 1550–2000. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.
  854.  
  855. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  856.  
  857. Twelve essays on infanticide, mostly in England and other European countries, most of which show the importance of the marital status and sexual behavior of mothers in shaping responses to these killings.
  858.  
  859. Find this resource:
  860.  
  861.  
  862. Mungello, David E. 2008. Drowning girls in China: Female infanticide since 1650. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
  863.  
  864. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  865.  
  866. An ambitious analysis of female infanticide and the social and legal responses to it over three centuries in China.
  867.  
  868. Find this resource:
  869.  
  870.  
  871. Roth, Randolph. 2001. Child murder in New England. Social Science History 25.1:101–147.
  872.  
  873. DOI: 10.1215/01455532-25-1-101Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  874.  
  875. Child murder in New England apparently declined from the mid 17th century to the beginning of the 19th century, but then rose thereafter until the early 20th century.
  876.  
  877. Find this resource:
  878.  
  879.  
  880. Intimate Violence
  881. Historical studies of intimate violence provide insights into marital relations and gender inequality and how these have changed over time: into changes in legal constructions of marriage and the family, and into the social and contextual factors that shape violence between intimate partners. Gordon’s 1988 important book touches on all of these topics by analyzing the incidence of family violence, the characteristics of those involved in it, and the responses of social welfare agencies to it in Boston from the late–19th century on. Ferguson’s 2010 case study uses court cases dealing with intimate partner violence to examine family and gender relations among the working poor in late-19th-century France. Foyster’s 2005 more sweeping survey of marital violence in England across two hundred years is necessarily interested in more general patterns; she finds more continuity than change in the frequency and forms of intimate violence. Through his analysis of divorce cases in Oregon from the mid-19th century on, Peterson del Mar 1996 is able to suggest that there was a decline in marital violence over this time period and to document the increasing public and legal disapproval of it. The local case studies in the Daniels and Kennedy 1999 collection cover a variety of themes, including how notions of masculinity and assumptions about ideal families shaped intimate violence and how women were not powerless, either personally or legally, in the face of abuse from their husbands. Gillis 1996 provides a quantitative analysis of the relationship between marital patterns and spousal homicide over time in France. Historical studies of intimate partner violence in non-Western countries are relatively rare, and so the research by Oldenburg 2002 and by Sev’er and Gökçeçiçek Yurdakul 2001 provides important insight into cross-cultural patterns of intimate violence.
  882.  
  883. Daniels, Christine, and Michael V. Kennedy, eds. 1999. Over the threshold: Intimate violence in early America. New York: Routledge.
  884.  
  885. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  886.  
  887. The 14 chapters in this book discuss multiple forms of domestic violence, including violence between lovers; spouses; parents and children; and masters, servants, and slaves and connect these to various forms of domestic inequality.
  888.  
  889. Find this resource:
  890.  
  891.  
  892. Ferguson, Eliza Earle. 2010. Gender and justice: Violence, intimacy and community in fin-de- siècle Paris. Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, 128th ser., 1. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.
  893.  
  894. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  895.  
  896. An analysis of 264 court cases involving violence between domestic partners—most of whom were from the poor working class—in the last three decades of the 19th century.
  897.  
  898. Find this resource:
  899.  
  900.  
  901. Foyster, Elizabeth. 2005. Marital violence: An English family history, 1660–1857. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  902.  
  903. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511495809Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  904.  
  905. A thorough examination of the “hidden” history of marital violence and its place in English family life between the Restoration and the mid-19th century.
  906.  
  907. Find this resource:
  908.  
  909.  
  910. Gillis, A. R. 1996. So long as they both shall live: Marital dissolution and the decline of domestic homicide in France, 1852–1909. American Journal of Sociology 101.5:1273–1305.
  911.  
  912. DOI: 10.1086/230823Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  913.  
  914. With the institutionalization of separation and divorce in 19th-century France, spousal homicides, especially those by males, declined, according to the analysis in this paper.
  915.  
  916. Find this resource:
  917.  
  918.  
  919. Gordon, Linda. 1988. Heroes of their own lives: The politics and history of family violence, Boston, 1880–1960. New York: Viking.
  920.  
  921. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  922.  
  923. An important study by an eminent social historian, this study examines wife beating and other forms of family violence, drawing on hundreds of case records from social agencies devoted to dealing with these problems.
  924.  
  925. Find this resource:
  926.  
  927.  
  928. Oldenburg, Veena Talwar. 2002. Dowry murder: The imperial origins of a cultural crime. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
  929.  
  930. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  931.  
  932. An examination of the historic connection—both before and during the British colonial period in India—between the practice of dowry and the murder of female infants and young wives.
  933.  
  934. Find this resource:
  935.  
  936.  
  937. Peterson del Mar, David. 1996. What trouble I have seen: A history of violence against wives. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
  938.  
  939. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  940.  
  941. This analysis of records of divorce cases in Oregon from the mid-19th century onward finds that the extent and severity of violence against wives varied substantially over time.
  942.  
  943. Find this resource:
  944.  
  945.  
  946. Sev’er, Aysan, and Gökçeçiçek Yurdakul. 2001. Culture of honor, culture of change: A feminist analysis of honor killings in rural Turkey. Violence Against Women 7.9:964–998.
  947.  
  948. DOI: 10.1177/10778010122182866Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  949.  
  950. The authors argue that honor killings are linked not to particular religions but to patriarchal patterns of violence against women. Their analysis suggests that some of the changes associated with the shift from traditionalism to modernism in Turkey over the 20th century have contributed to rather than reduced the incidence of honor killings.
  951.  
  952. Find this resource:
  953.  
  954.  
  955. Sexual Violence
  956. As with infanticide, although for somewhat different reasons, attempts at discovering trends over time in sexual violence are fraught with problems. For both sexual assault and infanticide, the number of known cases is greatly outnumbered by the number of cases that were undetected, underreported, or otherwise undocumented by historical records. Nevertheless, historians have pieced together information from a range of sources to describe characteristics of known victims and offenders, legal responses to sexual assault, and cultural beliefs about and definitions of what constituted (hetero) sexual assault. (The history of same-sex sexual assault is seriously under-researched.) By covering four centuries, Vigarello’s 2001 analysis reveals substantial shifts in the meanings of and sensitivities related to sexual assault in France. Rape was initially treated as a form of theft (of a father’s or husband’s property); victims were often suspected of complicity, and offenders were typically viewed as ordinary men overcome with lust. Not until the end of the 19th century were child rape and marital rape—but only if the woman was seriously injured—acknowledged as crimes. Similar patterns are reported in studies of other locales. Block 2006 finds that while rape was viewed as a heinous crime in 18th-century America, it was rarely prosecuted, in part because normal heterosexual relations were assumed to involve some element of both resistance on the part of women and aggressive pursuit on the part of men. A common theme in historical studies of rape, as illustrated in Kelly’s 1995 research on 18th-century Ireland, is the humiliation victims of rape experienced if they sought legal redress. As Dubinsky 1993, among others, shows, the social standing of victims and offenders affected the extent to which women’s accusations were taken seriously. D’Cruz 1998 offers a more theoretically based account of sexuality and violence that emphasizes women’s agency, not simply their victimhood, and shows how women’s family, work, and community networks shaped both their risks of and responses to sexual violence. Together these works point to the timelessness of sexual violence, but the historical specificity of responses to it by victims, the legal system, and the public.
  957.  
  958. Block, Sharon. 2006. Rape and sexual power in early America. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press.
  959.  
  960. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  961.  
  962. Based on 912 instances of sexual coercion recorded in popular print between 1700 and 1820, this is the definitive study of sexual violence in early American history.
  963.  
  964. Find this resource:
  965.  
  966.  
  967. D’Cruze, Shani. 1998. Crimes of outrage: Sex, violence and Victorian working women. Women’s History. London: Univ. College of London Press.
  968.  
  969. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  970.  
  971. A Foucauldian and feminist analysis of more than nine hundred cases involving sexuality and violence gathered from 19th-century legal records in three English counties.
  972.  
  973. Find this resource:
  974.  
  975.  
  976. Dubinsky, Karen. 1993. Improper advances: Rape and heterosexual conflict in Ontario, 1880–1929. Chicago Series on Sexuality, History, and Society. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
  977.  
  978. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  979.  
  980. Drawing from newspaper sources, court records, and other primary sources, this book documents the experiences of some four hundred women who complained officially about sexual coercion and assault in late-19th and early-20th-century Ontario, Canada.
  981.  
  982. Find this resource:
  983.  
  984.  
  985. Kelly, James. 1995. “A most inhuman and barbarous piece of villainy”: An exploration of the crime of rape in eighteenth-century Ireland. Eighteenth -Century Ireland 10:78–107.
  986.  
  987. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  988.  
  989. An analysis of the characteristics of and responses to rape and rapists in Ireland based on 18th-century press reports.
  990.  
  991. Find this resource:
  992.  
  993.  
  994. Vigarello, Georges. 2001. A history of rape: Sexual violence in France from the 16th to the 20th century. Translated by Jean Birrell. Oxford: Polity.
  995.  
  996. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  997.  
  998. A distinguished cultural historian of early modern France reviews archival and secondary sources to document sexual violence and trace changes in responses to it over several centuries.
  999.  
  1000. Find this resource:
  1001.  
  1002.  
  1003. Dueling
  1004. While there is some disagreement among scholars about the origin of dueling—McAleer 1994 locates it in medieval France while Kiernan 1988 and Hughes 2007 see its beginnings in Renaissance Italy—there is consensus that it was considered a privilege and obligation among men of the noble classes whose honor was questioned. According to Kiernan’s 1988 expansive analysis, dueling in early modern Europe allowed aristocrats —especially those on the fringes of nobility—to strengthen their sense of class identity through shared notions and practices of honor. Military codes of honor also encouraged dueling among officers, as McAleer 1994 shows in his analysis of late-19th- and early-20th-century Germany and Hughes 2007 demonstrates in his study of modern Italy. Peltonen 2003 links dueling with concepts of courtesy and civility, arguing that the presence of the former encouraged the latter in early modern England. Dueling cultures had some national specificity, as Hughes 2007, Taylor 2008, and McAleer 1994 illustrate in their studies of Italy, Spain, and Germany, respectively. Always part of some type of masculine honor code, dueling declined as notions of honor changed, according to Shoemaker 2002 in his analysis of duels in London from the late 17th through the 18th centuries. As each of the studies in this section show, at various points efforts were made to control or criminalize dueling, but these often were undermined by the ambivalence of legal officials to prosecute duelists. It was not until the beginning of the 20th century that dueling finally receded as a ritual of masculinity.
  1005.  
  1006. Kiernan, V. G. 1988. The duel in European history: Honor and the reign of the aristocracy. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
  1007.  
  1008. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1009.  
  1010. A Marxist analysis of the evolution of the duel from its earliest beginnings through its peak in the early modern period up to the early 20th century.
  1011.  
  1012. Find this resource:
  1013.  
  1014.  
  1015. Hughes, Steven. 2007. Politics of the sword: Dueling, honor and masculinity in modern Italy. History of Crime and Criminal Justice. Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press.
  1016.  
  1017. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1018.  
  1019. By tracing the role of dueling in Italian honor culture over two centuries, this book shows how the duel became popular with modernizing elites, who regarded themselves as exemplars of the political culture of the future.
  1020.  
  1021. Find this resource:
  1022.  
  1023.  
  1024. McAleer, Kevin. 1994. Dueling: The cult of honor in fin-de-siècle Germany. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
  1025.  
  1026. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1027.  
  1028. An analysis of the rules surrounding dueling and the values it represented in Germany’s Second Reich, this book also explores why dueling lingered on in Germany much longer than it did in Britain.
  1029.  
  1030. Find this resource:
  1031.  
  1032.  
  1033. Peltonen, Markku. 2003. The duel in early modern England: Civility, politeness and honour. Ideas in Context. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  1034.  
  1035. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511490651Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1036.  
  1037. The first comprehensive study of many aspects of the duel in early modern England; describes contemporary claims that it maintained and enhanced civility and politeness.
  1038.  
  1039. Find this resource:
  1040.  
  1041.  
  1042. Shoemaker, Robert. 2002. The taming of the duel: Masculinity, honour and ritual in London, 1660–1800. Historical Journal 45.3:525–545.
  1043.  
  1044. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1045.  
  1046. An important English historian describes changes in the nature of, reasons for, and responses to duels over the course of the 18th century.
  1047.  
  1048. Find this resource:
  1049.  
  1050.  
  1051. Taylor, Scott. 2008. Honor and violence in Golden Age Spain. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.
  1052.  
  1053. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1054.  
  1055. Surviving records of 477 Castillian criminal trials between 1600 and 1652 are analyzed to show that honor and dueling were tools to manage relations with others rather than requirements that limited choices of action.
  1056.  
  1057. Find this resource:
  1058.  
  1059.  
  1060. Bandits and Highwaymen
  1061. In contrast to dueling, banditry was the domain of poor and marginalized men. The extent to which bandits and highway robbers sought more than personal gain is an important theme in the historical literature. In his renowned Marxist-inspired analysis of banditry, Hobsbawm 1969 distinguishes ordinary bandits from social bandits and argues that the latter were more interested in challenging the state than in self-aggrandizement. In contrast, Blok 1972 contends that class conflict was a motivating factor in banditry not nearly as often as Hobsbawm claims, an argument consistent with Shaw’s 1984 analysis of banditry during the Roman Empire. Brandon’s 2001 more popularized history examines how changes in social, economic, and technological contexts affected the forms and lucrativeness of highway robbery in England over several centuries. His and McGrath’s 1984 studies emphasize the self-serving rather than political aspects of highway robbery. McGrath’s research on two 19th-century towns in California also argues that robbery was not nearly as common on the frontier as is often assumed.
  1062.  
  1063. Blok, Anton. 1972. The peasant and the brigand: Social banditry reconsidered. Comparative studies in history and society 14.4:494–503.
  1064.  
  1065. DOI: 10.1017/S0010417500006824Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1066.  
  1067. A commentary on Hobsbawm’s 1969 book and his concept of the social bandit, which argues that the element of class conflict is overemphasized in Hobsbawm’s analysis.
  1068.  
  1069. Find this resource:
  1070.  
  1071.  
  1072. Brandon, David. 2001. Stand and deliver! A history of highway robbery. Stroud, UK: Sutton.
  1073.  
  1074. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1075.  
  1076. An overview of highwaymen from the medieval times to the 19th century that examines the economic and social factors encouraging it as well as its romanticization.
  1077.  
  1078. Find this resource:
  1079.  
  1080.  
  1081. Hobsbawm, Eric J. 1969. Bandits. New York: Delacourt.
  1082.  
  1083. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1084.  
  1085. A sweeping history of bandits and banditry by one of Britain’s most prominent historians, this book argues that bandits were the voice of peasant rebellion, often seen as heroes by ordinary people and as criminals by the state.
  1086.  
  1087. Find this resource:
  1088.  
  1089.  
  1090. McGrath, Roger. 1984. Gunfighters, highwaymen and vigilantes: Violence on the frontier. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
  1091.  
  1092. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1093.  
  1094. This study of crime in two 19th-century Sierra mining camps finds high levels of violence, but only of certain types—such as stagecoach robbery and shootings between “tough characters” known to live off the wages of crime.
  1095.  
  1096. Find this resource:
  1097.  
  1098.  
  1099. Shaw, Brent D. 1984. Bandits in the Roman empire. Past and Present 105:3–52.
  1100.  
  1101. DOI: 10.1093/past/105.1.3Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1102.  
  1103. A detailed analysis of banditry in antiquity that places its origins in the incomplete domination of the Roman state outside of towns and cities; argues that bandits were rarely social and political rebels who sought to challenge the state.
  1104.  
  1105. Find this resource:
  1106.  
  1107.  
  1108. Lynching and Vigilantism
  1109. Lynching and vigilantism often are referred to as forms of popular justice, whereby ordinary citizens take the law into their own hands to punish those they deem wrong-doers or threats to the social order. While instances of such “rough justice” have occurred throughout history, they appear to have been particularly popular in the United States from the 18th century on. As such, Moses’s 1997 comprehensive bibliography, which covers scholarly research and popular writing about vigilantism and lynching, appropriately focuses on America. Lynching as a form of racial control is a common theme in this literature, as the Brundage 1997 collection illustrates; however, these essays also point out that both whites and blacks were victims as well as perpetrators. That lynching was central to white supremacy in the southern United States is accepted by virtually all scholars of lynching in the United States, but some argue that other factors were as, or at times more important in shaping when and where lynching took place. Tolnay and Beck’s 1995 careful statistical analysis of lynching in ten southern states shows that the economics of cotton production played a key role; whites relied on exploited black workers to sustain cotton production and used lynching as a way to ensure a regular supply of laborers. As Pfeiffer 2004 demonstrates, lynchings were not exclusively southern or about race. He offers a culturally based analysis of the struggle between those who valued due process and those who wanted rapid, community-based retribution against wrongdoers. Those involved in lynchings in the seven states he studies came from all class backgrounds and justified their violence as necessary to compensate for an absent, ineffective, and/or sluggish legal system. Delgado 2009 provides important information and analysis of lynchings that targeted Latinos, noting that these acts of violence have been neglected in the historical literature.
  1110.  
  1111. Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, ed. 1997. Under sentence of death: Lynching in the South. Chapel Hill, NC: Univ. of North Carolina Press.
  1112.  
  1113. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1114.  
  1115. The eleven essays in this volume provide case studies of particular lynchings and of antilynching protests and activism, along with more quantitative chapters describing the extent and distribution of lynchings in the southern United States from the mid–19th century on.
  1116.  
  1117. Find this resource:
  1118.  
  1119.  
  1120. Delgado, Richard. 2009. The law of the noose: A history of Latino lynching. Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 44:297–312.
  1121.  
  1122. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1123.  
  1124. An analysis of almost six hundred lynchings of Latinos, most in the southwestern United States, that asks why so little is known about these acts of violence.
  1125.  
  1126. Find this resource:
  1127.  
  1128.  
  1129. Moses, Norton. 1997. Lynching and vigilantism in the United States: An annotated bibliography. Bibliographies and Indexes in American History 34. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
  1130.  
  1131. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1132.  
  1133. This bibliography contains over four thousand entries, which are divided into nine categories and broken down chronologically and topically.
  1134.  
  1135. Find this resource:
  1136.  
  1137.  
  1138. Pfeiffer, Michael J. 2004. Rough justice: Lynching and American society, 1874–1947. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press.
  1139.  
  1140. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1141.  
  1142. One of the most comprehensive and stimulating accounts of lynching, the quintessential form of American violence, this book is both national in scope and attentive to regional variation in “rough justice.”
  1143.  
  1144. Find this resource:
  1145.  
  1146.  
  1147. Tolnay, Steward, and E. M. Beck. 1995. A festival of violence: An analysis of southern lynchings, 1882–1930. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press.
  1148.  
  1149. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1150.  
  1151. An award-winning statistical study of lynching in ten southern states showing that economic and status concerns were the source of variations in lynching over time.
  1152.  
  1153. Find this resource:
  1154.  
  1155.  
  1156. Case Studies of Violent Crimes
  1157. Many historical studies of violence examine broad patterns of violent behavior and illustrate general themes and findings about these patterns through selective descriptions of specific violent events or persons. In contrast, historical case studies of specific violent acts delve deeply into the lives of a small set of people, interactions, and events to provide insights into how individuals—sometimes ordinary, sometimes not—lived their lives and thought about the world, how they were affected by and contributed to larger historical events and processes, and how they dealt with conflicts and struggled with everyday demands of living. The books by Pomeroy 2007, Herrup 1999, and Somerset 2003 each investigate murder among elites. Reaching into the distant past, Pomeroy reconstructs the marriage and murder of a well-born woman largely as a means to explore the lives of upper-class girls and women in 2nd-century Greece and Rome. For Herrup, it is the 17th-century trial of an English earl for rape and sodomy that provides insights not into violence per se but into conceptions of and expectations about family patriarchy as revealed at the earl’s trial. Somerset focuses on a notorious scandal over poisonings and witchcraft at the court of Louis XIV in part to reveal the origins of the shift from tolerance of noble licentiousness and vice toward an ideology of piety in late-17th- and early-18th-century France. The lives of marginalized people and the contexts in which they live can also be examined through their involvement in lethal violence, as the books by Spierenberg 2004 and Cohen 1998 demonstrate. Spierenberg uses the murders of two women living at the edges of respectable society in 18th-century Amsterdam to describe the increasing importance of emotional intimacy in marriage and the family, one consequence of which was intimate violence. Similarly, Cohen’s evocative portrayal of the murder of a prostitute and the trial of her accused killer reveals much about gender and sexuality, as well as urban institutions in 19th-century New York City. Popular attitudes about gender and sexuality—as well as religion—also are central to understanding two related murders and the reactions to them in Seattle early in the 20th century, according to Phillips and Gartner 2003. Gender, sexuality, and the family are important themes in these and other case studies because violence so often is associated with them. In the United States, race has also played a critical role in shaping violence, as Butterfield’s 1995 book demonstrates. He uses historical evidence about slavery and racism to trace the family history of a young man who engages in extreme acts of violence in the late 20th century. The cases examined in most of these studies may be atypical and allow few generalizations about historical patterns in interpersonal violence (though they do provide useful evidence about historical patterns in reactions to violence). However, they are invaluable resources for tracing cultural, structural, and institutional changes in society that shape and are shaped by violence.
  1158.  
  1159. Butterfield, Fox. 1995. All God’s children: The Bosket family and the American tradition of violence. New York: Knopf.
  1160.  
  1161. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1162.  
  1163. Written by a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, this book, in evocative and disturbing detail, traces the cumulative effect of racism and violence on an African American family from the days of slavery in South Carolina to late–20th-century New York City.
  1164.  
  1165. Find this resource:
  1166.  
  1167.  
  1168. Cohen, Patricia Cline. 1998. The murder of Helen Jewett: The life and death of a prostitute in 19th-century New York. New York: Knopf.
  1169.  
  1170. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1171.  
  1172. A thoroughly researched and highly engaging analysis of the sensational killing of Helen Jewett, a twenty-three-year-old prostitute of considerable refinement, and the trial of her accused killer, this book provides a glimpse into several aspects of life in New York City in the 1830s.
  1173.  
  1174. Find this resource:
  1175.  
  1176.  
  1177. Herrup, Cynthia B. 1999. A house in gross disorder: Sex, law and the Second Earl of Castlehaven. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
  1178.  
  1179. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1180.  
  1181. The Castlehaven case, a notorious sex scandal involving accusations of rape and sodomy, serves as the means for a highly regarded legal historian to illuminate the world of 17th-century elite assumptions about men, families, sexuality, and aristocracy.
  1182.  
  1183. Find this resource:
  1184.  
  1185.  
  1186. Phillips, Jim, and Rosemary Gartner. 2003. Murdering holiness: The trials of Franz Creffield and George Mitchell. Law and Society series. Vancouver: Univ. of British Columbia Press.
  1187.  
  1188. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1189.  
  1190. A legal historian and sociologist explore the murder of the leader of a Holy Roller sect in Seattle in 1906, the trial of his killer, and the acquitted killer’s murder to illuminate how the “unwritten law” was used to justify killing to protect family honor.
  1191.  
  1192. Find this resource:
  1193.  
  1194.  
  1195. Pomeroy, Sarah B. 2007. The murder of Regilla: A case of domestic violence in antiquity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
  1196.  
  1197. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1198.  
  1199. A respected historian of ancient history provides a fascinating portrait of the world of high-status women in Imperial Rome, through an analysis of the murder of one woman by her wealthy husband and his acquittal for the crime.
  1200.  
  1201. Find this resource:
  1202.  
  1203.  
  1204. Somerset, Anne. 2003. The affair of the poisons: Murder, infanticide, and satanism at the court of Louis XIV. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
  1205.  
  1206. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1207.  
  1208. An accomplished historian delves into a scandal that gripped Paris and the French court in the late 17th century, when a royal commission linked prominent members of court society to purveyors of poisons and spells.
  1209.  
  1210. Find this resource:
  1211.  
  1212.  
  1213. Spierenberg, Pieter. 2004. Written in blood: Fatal attraction in Enlightenment Amsterdam. History of Crime and Criminal Justice series. Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press.
  1214.  
  1215. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1216.  
  1217. A fine example of microhistorical studies of violence, this book examines the murders of two women in 18th-century Amsterdam as evidence of a cultural shift from an older culture of honor to an emerging culture of sentiment.
  1218.  
  1219. Find this resource:
  1220.  
  1221.  
  1222. Explanations of the Long-Term Decline in Violence
  1223. A number of the studies described throughout this entry have discussed possible explanations for the long-term decline in interpersonal violence described earlier. The most widely endorsed account is derived from Norbert Elias’s 1969–1982 seminal work, The civilizing process. In this book, Elias develops an account of the gradual civilization of manners and personality in Europe from the Middle Ages on, a process linked to the state’s growing monopolization of power and to increasing levels of control individuals exerted over their impulses, drives, and emotions. Fletcher 1997 elaborates on Elias’s thesis, noting that it explains how interpersonal violence “was increasingly ‘confined to barracks’, legitimately practiced only by members of the armed forces and the police, or within specific, controlled contexts (53).” Among the strongest advocates for Elias’s civilization thesis is Spierenburg 2001, a historian, who addresses criticisms of the thesis, points to extensive evidence supporting it, and contends that the thesis can incorporate honor-related violence and its ritualization in the Middle Ages. Eisner 2003, a sociologist, also relies heavily on Elias’s civilizing thesis to explain the long-term trends in violence in Western Europe that Eisner documents. Mares 2009 suggests that by incorporating more attention to economic processes and cycles, the civilizing thesis can be expanded to explain short-term deviations from the long-term trend. For Wood 2007, evolutionary psychology has much to offer Elias’s and other cultural perspectives on historical patterns in violence. Cooney 2003, a sociologist, is more interested in explaining qualitative changes in violence over time and, finding Elias’s work inadequate to this task, suggests that the weakening of social ties and the decline of statelessness were responsible for what he calls “the privatization of violence.” Economists North, et al. 2009 argue in their political-economic analysis that the decline in violence resulted from a shift from what they call “natural states,” which are based on personalistic ties, to “open access orders,” which are based on more impersonal, institutional ties.
  1224.  
  1225. Cooney, Mark. 2003. The privatization of violence. Criminology 41:1377–1406.
  1226.  
  1227. DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-9125.2003.tb01023.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1228.  
  1229. The centuries-long shift from public, non-intimate violence to private intimate violence is explained better by theoretical work on conflict resolution than by Elias’s 1969–82 notion of the civilizing process, according to this sociologist.
  1230.  
  1231. Find this resource:
  1232.  
  1233.  
  1234. Eisner, Manuel. 2003. Long-term historical trends in violent crime. In Crime and justice: A review of research. Vol. 30. Edited by Michael Tonry, 83–142. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
  1235.  
  1236. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1237.  
  1238. The last section of this overview of historical trends in violence discusses various theoretical approaches that have been used, or could be used, to explain the long-term decline in violence, including those developed by Weber and Durkheim.
  1239.  
  1240. Find this resource:
  1241.  
  1242.  
  1243. Elias, Norbert. 1969–1982. The civilizing process. Vols. 1 and 2. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Oxford: Blackwell.
  1244.  
  1245. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1246.  
  1247. The single most influential framework for understanding the long-term decline in violence, this two-volume work by a German sociologist describes how changing habits and norms of European societies between 800 and 1900 reined in violence and cruelty. Volume 1 is entitled The history of manners (ISBN is 9780394711331); Volume 2, State formation and civilization (ISBN is 9780631135876).
  1248.  
  1249. Find this resource:
  1250.  
  1251.  
  1252. Fletcher, Jonathan. 1997. Violence and civilization: An introduction to the work of Norbert Elias. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
  1253.  
  1254. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1255.  
  1256. An excellent introduction to and appraisal of the work of Norbert Elias that engages with major critiques of this work and develops the concept of decivilizing processes.
  1257.  
  1258. Find this resource:
  1259.  
  1260.  
  1261. Mares, Dennis M. 2009. Civilization, economic change, and trends in interpersonal violence in Western societies. Theoretical criminology 13.4:419–449.
  1262.  
  1263. DOI: 10.1177/1362480609340401Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1264.  
  1265. Building on Elias’s civilizing thesis, this article argues for more attention to economic processes that can account for shorter-term upswings in violence.
  1266.  
  1267. Find this resource:
  1268.  
  1269.  
  1270. North, Douglass, John Joseph Wallace, and Barry R. Weingast. 2009. Violence and social orders: A conceptual framework for interpreting recorded human history. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  1271.  
  1272. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511575839Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1273.  
  1274. A Nobel Prize–winning economic historian and his colleagues provide a sweeping analysis of the suppression of violence, the central problem for all states, from pre-modern to modern times.
  1275.  
  1276. Find this resource:
  1277.  
  1278.  
  1279. Spierenburg, Pieter. 2001. Violence and the civilizing process: Does it work? Crime, histoire et sociétiés/Crime, history and societies 5.2:5–31.
  1280.  
  1281. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1282.  
  1283. A response to criticisms of Elias’s theory of civilization as it pertains to violence, this article also reviews additional historical evidence that supports the theory.
  1284.  
  1285. Find this resource:
  1286.  
  1287.  
  1288. Wood, J. Carter. 2007. The limits of culture? Society, evolutionary psychology and the history of violence. Cultural and social history 4.1:95–114.
  1289.  
  1290. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1291.  
  1292. A call for integrating the perspectives of evolutionary psychology with cultural and social histories of violence.
  1293.  
  1294. Find this resource:
  1295.  
  1296.  
  1297. Explaining US Exceptionalism
  1298. Trends in, but especially levels of, serious interpersonal violence in the United States historically have differed from those in other Western, developed democracies. The works listed below are efforts to explain this American exceptionalism—or regional manifestations of it— by reference to historical processes as opposed to more contemporary differences between the United States and other countries. Monkkonen 2006 offers a series of tentative hypotheses pointing to the availability of hand guns, particular forms of American masculinity, high rates of geographic mobility, a fragmented criminal justice system, the low likelihood of punishment, and the institution of slavery as possible sources of unusual levels of violence in the United States. Picking up on Monkonnen’s claim that historically US courts have tended to deal more leniently with homicide, Dale 2006 suggests reasons for this tendency. In contrast, Spierenburg 2006 challenges Monkkonen (especially his dismissal of Elias) and argues that from its beginnings the American state was not nearly as effective as European countries either at imposing a monopoly on the use of force or at controlling the ownership of lethal weapons. For Nisbett and Cohen 1996, what makes American violence so distinctive is its historical and continuing concentration in the US South, which they attribute to a culture of honor brought to the South by its early settlers. Zimring and Hawkins 1997 take a different view of American exceptionalism, arguing that what sets the United States apart from other industrialized countries is not its levels of violence per se, but its levels of lethal and near-lethal violence; hence, explanations for American exceptionalism need to focus on life-threatening violence.
  1299.  
  1300. Dale, Elizabeth. 2006. Getting away with murder. American historical review 111:95–103.
  1301.  
  1302. DOI: 10.1086/ahr.111.1.95Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1303.  
  1304. A response to Monkkonen’s 2006 article, which traces American exceptionalism in violence to the tendency of US courts to deal with homicide leniently.
  1305.  
  1306. Find this resource:
  1307.  
  1308.  
  1309. Monkkonen, Eric. 2006. Homicide: Explaining America’s exceptionalism. American historical review 111.1:76–94.
  1310.  
  1311. DOI: 10.1086/ahr.111.1.76Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1312.  
  1313. An effort by one of the premier historians of American violence to account for the high and rising rates of homicide in the United States over the past two hundred years, which contrast with lower and declining rates in Europe.
  1314.  
  1315. Find this resource:
  1316.  
  1317.  
  1318. Nisbett, Robert E., and Cohen, Dov. 1996. Culture of honor: The psychology of violence in the South. New Directions in Social Psychology. Boulder, CO: Westview.
  1319.  
  1320. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1321.  
  1322. Historically high rates of violence in the southern United States are attributed to a culture of honor based on herding economies and brought to the South by Scotch-Irish immigrants.
  1323.  
  1324. Find this resource:
  1325.  
  1326.  
  1327. Spierenburg, Pieter. 2006. Democracy came too early: A tentative explanation for the problem of American homicide. American historical review 111.1:104–114.
  1328.  
  1329. DOI: 10.1086/ahr.111.1.104Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1330.  
  1331. Another response to Monkkonen’s 2006 article challenging his dismissal of the applicability of Elias’s 1969–1982 notion of the civilizing process to the United States.
  1332.  
  1333. Find this resource:
  1334.  
  1335.  
  1336. Zimring, Franklin E., and Gordon Hawkins. 1997. Crime is not the problem: Lethal violence in America. Studies in Crime and Public Policy. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
  1337.  
  1338. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1339.  
  1340. Drawing on data from the G7 nations during the last third of the 20th century, the authors show that levels of several types of assaultive behavior are fairly uniform across these countries, but that “assaults and robberies that present special dangers to life are much more prevalent in the United States” (49). The implications of this finding for theories of and policies toward violence are also discussed in the book.
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