Title: Violence and Crime in Nineteenth-Century America
Abstract: Dickson D. Bruce, Jr. Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979. 322 + viii pp. David R. Johnson. Policing the Urban Underworld: The Impact of Crime on the Development of the American Police, 1800-1887. Philadelphia: ' Temple University Press, 1979. 240 + viii pp. Roger Lane. Violent Death in the City: Suicide, Accident and Murder in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979. 193 + xiii pp. Not a visitation from evil social outcasts, violence was an intrinsic part of the American personality and social structure, or so state these three authors, and most contemporary historians would agree. The authors considered here place violence and crime within wider intellectual frameworks, analyze the functions violence and crime served, and deal with violence and crime as personal and social indices to some broader historical questions. What is lost in this general approach is any sense of horror, or of the specialness of these forms of human action, or of their consequences upon perpetrators and victims alike. Perhaps one cause of this detachment is a desire to move beyond the past fifteen years' historical and sociological breast-beating that Americans were extraordinarily and perhaps uncontrollably violent. While none of these authors denies that there was a great deal of violence in American society, all want to explain it in context, rather than simply to count it up and categorize it in a bout of America Firstism gone perverse. Much explantory power clearly is gained by such detachment, yet the danger remains of rendering violence banal and ordinary in the end.
Publication Year: 1981
Publication Date: 1981-12-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot