Product Description: Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in the social history of crime an-long a variety of disciplines. This book examines the rapid spread of uniformed police forces throughout late nineteenth-century urban America. It suggests that, initially, the new kind of police in industrial cities served primarily as agents of class control, dispensing and administering welfare services as an unintentioned consequence of their uniformed presence on the streets...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Book by MONKKONEN, ERIC (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

With more than 1,400 entries written by 900 historians, this sweeping history of the U.S. covers social, cultural, intellectual, artistic, and religious trends across three hundred years. (view table of contents)

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Product Description: Shows that both rural and urban communities in Sweden, Holland, England, and other countries were far more violent during the late Middle Ages. This book also challenges a number of other historical-sociological theories, among them that contemporary organized crime is new, and addresses debate about the meaning and usefulness of crime statistics...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: With the United States on the way to becoming an almost completely urban nation, the financing of cities has become an issue of great urgency; put simply, American cities do not have enough money. This book examines the role of local fiscal policies and fiscal politics in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America...read more

Product Description: Vigorous historical exploration has increased across the social sciences in the past two decades. Originally published as a series of articles in the journal Social Science History, the essays in this volume provide a guide to historical social science by surveying the use of historical data and methodologies in anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, and geography...read more

Product Description: This volume brings up the issues which cut across particular locales or topics. The theoretical issues move well beyond the confines of criminal justice or single time periods. The issues reach out to American culture and to that of western Europe...read more

Product Description: America has a far more violent and criminal past than most realize. Some historians in the 1960s and 1970s argued that America had a uniquely violent culture, tying this position to American foreign policy and urban riots. Though useful in focusing on past episodes of violence, these historians worked more as cultural commentators and their work did not contribute to a broader empirical or deeper cultural understanding of criminal violence in the past...read more

Product Description: America has a far more violent and criminal past than most realize. Some historians in the 1960s and 1970s argued that America had a uniquely violent culture, tying this position to American foreign policy and urban riots. Though useful in focusing on past episodes of violence, these historians worked more as cultural commentators and their work did not contribute to a broader empirical or deeper cultural understanding of criminal violence in the past...read more

Product Description: Prison and jails sounds like an unlikely topic for historical research. However the literature on prisons addresses a surprising range of other problems. The conclusions offered by these articles are important and timely. For instance, the early juvenile reform schools were often quite effective and parents of troublesome children recognized this, asking that their children be incarcerated...read more

Product Description: This volume brings up the issues which cut across particular locales or topics. The theoretical issues move well beyond the confines of criminal justice or single time periods. The issues reach out to American culture and to that of western Europe...read more

Historians have been able to discover far more about the nature and kinds of organized crime and vice in the past than one would at first expect. This knowledge does not extend to a systematic statistical understanding, but such does not exist for the exact nature of vice today either, for when both the offender and the "victim" (for example, the drug user) wish to conceal the offenses, measuring it is very difficult. Probably the best success in measuring such is in the case of alcohol consumption, where in the 20th century we have mortality data on death due to alcohol related diseases: these deaths went down dramatically during Prohibition, lending empirical credibility to the historian's argument that Prohibition decreased in an important way the consumption of alcohol (see John Burnham`s article in this volume). Few non-historians are aware of this positive assessment of Prohibition, just as few are aware of the high tolerance for houses of prostitution in 19th-century cities. The articles in this volume show that policy about vice control should be formulated with historical research as a critical part of its knowledge base, that such research can be done, and that even if it does no more than raise unexpected difficulties, it will accomplish a worthwhile mission in the way we try to improve and shape our society.

Product Description: America has a far more violent and criminal past than most realize. Some historians in the 1960s and 1970s argued that America had a uniquely violent culture, tying this position to American foreign policy and urban riots. Though useful in focusing on past episodes of violence, these historians worked more as cultural commentators and their work did not contribute to a broader empirical or deeper cultural understanding of criminal violence in the past...read more

Product Description: Prison and jails sounds like an unlikely topic for historical research. However the literature on prisons addresses a surprising range of other problems. The conclusions offered by these articles are important and timely. For instance, the early juvenile reform schools were often quite effective and parents of troublesome children recognized this, asking that their children be incarcerated...read more

Product Description: The history of the reform of the criminal justice system is easily seen as the history of failure; it helps in evaluating this long history if we think of it as the history of building the system, of forming it. And it tempers the harshness of our evaluations when we consider that the failures of the criminal justice system reflect out dim understanding of humans and how they work...read more

Product Description: Crime in colonial America has attracted historians for its ironies, antinomies and contradictions. The colonies, which for many English men and women offered entrepreneurial or religious opportunities, served as a prison for England; colonial law had to be the common law, but several colonies tried to implement Biblical principles; communal principles in the New England colonies conflicted with the state implied by criminal law; southern colonies depended on the subservient class system of indentures and slavery; the enforcement of criminal laws without a strong organizational or historical base is inherently difficult if not impossible; and for the historian, criminal records serve as an entre to a society often fileopietistically worshipped rather than studied by contemporary Americans...read more

Product Description: While the basic organization of criminal courts is mandated by law, and therefore usually easy to discover, the daily working of such courts is much more obscure. Two major issues have informed the research on criminal courts and their procedures, one concerned with issues of justice in a slave society and the other with the anomaly of plea bargaining...read more

Product Description: For historians, policy have proven to be an exciting and important subject. There are several reasons. First, policy as we know then are relatively new to the American scene, emerging in the middle of the nineteenth century. Before the modern policy, there were only various forms of policing inherited from the middle ages...read more

Product Description: Part of a series examining the history of crime and justice in America, this volume looks at the transition of America to a policed society. This history focuses on the larger organizational and political context of the law enforcers and also on the individuals whom they policed...read more

Product Description: For historians, policy have proven to be an exciting and important subject. There are several reasons. First, policy as we know then are relatively new to the American scene, emerging in the middle of the nineteenth century. Before the modern policy, there were only various forms of policing inherited from the middle ages...read more