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A compelling case can be made that violent crime, especially after the 1960s, was one of the most significant domestic issues in the United States. Indeed, few issues had as profound an effect on American life in the last third of the twentieth century. After 1965, crime rose to such levels that it frightened virtually all Americans and prompted significant alterations in everyday behaviors and even lifestyles. The risk of being mugged was a concern when Americans chose places to live and schools for their children, selected commuter routes to work, and planned their leisure activities. In some locales, people were afraid to leave their dwellings at any time, day or night, even to go to the market. In the worst of the post-1960s crime wave, Americans spent part of each day literally looking back over their shoulders. The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America is the first book to comprehensively examine this important phenomenon over the entire postwar era. It combines a social history of the United States with the insights of criminology and examines the relationship between rising and falling crime and such historical developments as the postwar economic boom, suburbanization and the rise of the middle class, baby booms and busts, war and antiwar protest, the urbanization of minorities, and more.
Provocative and timely: a pioneering neurocriminologist introduces the latest biological research into the causes of--and potential cures for--criminal behavior. With an 8-page full-color insert, and black-and-white illustrations throughout.
“An engrossing, moving, and utterly motivating account of the human stakes of gun violence in America.”—Samantha Power, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Education of an Idealist Is America destined to always be a violent nation? This sweeping history by U.S. senator Chris Murphy explores the origins of our violent impulses, the roots of our obsession with firearms, and the mythologies that prevent us from confronting our national crisis. In many ways, the United States sets the pace for other nations to follow. Yet on the most important human concern—the need to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe from physical harm—America isn’t a leader. We are disturbingly laggard. To confront this problem, we must first understand it. In this carefully researched and deeply emotional book, Senator Chris Murphy dissects our country’s violence-filled history and the role that our unique obsession with firearms plays in this national epidemic. Murphy tells the story of his profound personal transformation in the wake of the mass murder at Newtown, and his subsequent immersion in the complicated web of influences that drive American violence. Murphy comes to the conclusion that while America’s relationship to violence is indeed unique, America is not inescapably violent. Even as he details the reasons we’ve tolerated so much bloodshed for so long, he explains that we have the power to change. Murphy takes on the familiar arguments, obliterates the stale talking points, and charts the way to a fresh, less polarized conversation about violence and the weapons that enable it—a conversation we urgently need in order to transform the national dialogue and save lives.
The Roots of Violent Crime in America is criminologist Barry Latzer’s comprehensive analysis of crimes of violence—including murder, assault, and rape—in the United States from the 1880s through the 1930s. Combining the theoretical perspectives and methodological rigor of criminology with a synthesis of historical scholarship as well as original research and analysis, Latzer challenges conventional thinking about violent crime of this era. While scholars have traditionally cast American cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as dreadful places, Latzer suggests that despite overcrowding and poverty, U.S. cities enjoyed low rates of violent crime, especially when compared to rural areas. The rural South and the thinly populated West both suffered much higher levels of brutal crime than the metropolises of the East and Midwest. Latzer deemphasizes racism and bigotry as causes of violence during this period, noting that while many social groups confronted significant levels of discrimination and abuse, only some engaged in high levels of violent crime. Cultural predispositions and subcultures of violence, he posits, led some groups to participate more frequently in violent activity than others. He also argues that the prohibition on alcohol in the 1920s did not drive up rates of violent crime. Though the bootlegger wars contributed considerably to the murder rate in some of America’s largest municipalities, Prohibition also eliminated saloons, which served as hubs of vice, corruption, and lawlessness. The Roots of Violent Crime in America stands as a sweeping reevaluation of the causes of crimes of violence in the United States between the Gilded Age and World War II, compelling readers to rethink enduring assumptions on this contentious topic.
The most striking feature of violent crime around the world is its variability. Some societies are relatively safe and peaceful: in others, violent crime is a pervasive and devastating fact of life. In The Roots of Danger: Violent Crime in Global Perspective, Elliott Currie explores why some societies around the world are more violent than others. Beginning by defining violent crimes and discussing how they are measured, he then presents a variety of theories on the phenomenon of violent crime, first examining those theories that don't work and then looking at those that do. Currie concludes with a look toward the future of violence in the light of social, economic, and political changes that are transforming global society. Throughout the text, he draws examples from around the world, demonstrating similarities in the roots of violence across countries and across cultures. About the Series Keynotes in Criminology and Criminal Justice, edited by Henry N. Pontell, provides essential knowledge on important contemporary matters of crime, law, and justice to a broad audience of readers. Volumes are written by leading scholars in that area. Concise, accessible, and affordable, these texts are designed to serve either as primers around which courses can be built or as supplemental books for a variety of courses.
The Roots of Violent Crime in America is criminologist Barry Latzer’s comprehensive analysis of crimes of violence—including murder, assault, and rape—in the United States from the 1880s through the 1930s. Combining the theoretical perspectives and methodological rigor of criminology with a synthesis of historical scholarship as well as original research and analysis, Latzer challenges conventional thinking about violent crime of this era. While scholars have traditionally cast American cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as dreadful places, Latzer suggests that despite overcrowding and poverty, U.S. cities enjoyed low rates of violent crime, especially when compared to rural areas. The rural South and the thinly populated West both suffered much higher levels of brutal crime than the metropolises of the East and Midwest. Latzer deemphasizes racism and bigotry as causes of violence during this period, noting that while many social groups confronted significant levels of discrimination and abuse, only some engaged in high levels of violent crime. Cultural predispositions and subcultures of violence, he posits, led some groups to participate more frequently in violent activity than others. He also argues that the prohibition on alcohol in the 1920s did not drive up rates of violent crime. Though the bootlegger wars contributed considerably to the murder rate in some of America’s largest municipalities, Prohibition also eliminated saloons, which served as hubs of vice, corruption, and lawlessness. The Roots of Violent Crime in America stands as a sweeping reevaluation of the causes of crimes of violence in the United States between the Gilded Age and World War II, compelling readers to rethink enduring assumptions on this contentious topic.
“Not since Angela Davis’s 2003 book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, has a scholar so persuasively challenged our conventional understanding of the criminal legal system.” —Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr., Washington Post From one of our top historians, a groundbreaking story of policing and “riots” that shatters our understanding of the post–civil rights era. What began in spring 2020 as local protests in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police quickly exploded into a massive nationwide movement. Millions of mostly young people defiantly flooded into the nation’s streets, demanding an end to police brutality and to the broader, systemic repression of Black people and other people of color. To many observers, the protests appeared to be without precedent in their scale and persistence. Yet, as the acclaimed historian Elizabeth Hinton demonstrates in America on Fire, the events of 2020 had clear precursors—and any attempt to understand our current crisis requires a reckoning with the recent past. Even in the aftermath of Donald Trump, many Americans consider the decades since the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s as a story of progress toward greater inclusiveness and equality. Hinton’s sweeping narrative uncovers an altogether different history, taking us on a troubling journey from Detroit in 1967 and Miami in 1980 to Los Angeles in 1992 and beyond to chart the persistence of structural racism and one of its primary consequences, the so-called urban riot. Hinton offers a critical corrective: the word riot was nothing less than a racist trope applied to events that can only be properly understood as rebellions—explosions of collective resistance to an unequal and violent order. As she suggests, if rebellion and the conditions that precipitated it never disappeared, the optimistic story of a post–Jim Crow United States no longer holds. Black rebellion, America on Fire powerfully illustrates, was born in response to poverty and exclusion, but most immediately in reaction to police violence. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson launched the “War on Crime,” sending militarized police forces into impoverished Black neighborhoods. Facing increasing surveillance and brutality, residents threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at officers, plundered local businesses, and vandalized exploitative institutions. Hinton draws on exclusive sources to uncover a previously hidden geography of violence in smaller American cities, from York, Pennsylvania, to Cairo, Illinois, to Stockton, California. The central lesson from these eruptions—that police violence invariably leads to community violence—continues to escape policymakers, who respond by further criminalizing entire groups instead of addressing underlying socioeconomic causes. The results are the hugely expanded policing and prison regimes that shape the lives of so many Americans today. Presenting a new framework for understanding our nation’s enduring strife, America on Fire is also a warning: rebellions will surely continue unless police are no longer called on to manage the consequences of dismal conditions beyond their control, and until an oppressive system is finally remade on the principles of justice and equality.
Lynching has often been called "America's national crime" that has defined the tradition of extralegal violence in America. Having claimed many thousand victims, "Judge Lynch" holds a firm place in the dark recesses of our national memory. In Popular Justice, Manfred Berg explores the history of lynching from the colonial era to the present. American lynch law, he argues, has rested on three pillars: the frontier experience, racism, and the anti-authoritarian spirit of grassroots democracy. Berg looks beyond the familiar story of mob violence against African American victims, who comprised the majority of lynch targets, to include violence targeting other victim groups, such as Mexicans and the Chinese, as well as many of those cases in which race did not play a role. As he nears the modern era, he focuses on the societal changes that ended lynching as a public spectacle. Berg's narrative concludes with an examination of lynching's legacy in American culture. From the colonial era and the American Revolution up to the twenty-first century, lynching has been a part of our nation's history. Manfred Berg provides us with the first comprehensive overview of "popular justice."