1st Edition
The Routledge History of Crime in America
Covering a broad chronology from the colonial era to the present, this volume’s 28 chapters reflect the diverse approaches, interests and findings of an international group of new and established scholars working on American crime histories today.
The book is organized around major themes in crime history, including violence, science and technology, culture, gender and organized crime, and it addresses pressing contemporary concerns such as mass incarceration and the racial politics of crime in modern America. It also engages with the history of crime literature, film and popular culture from colonial execution sermons to true crime television in the twenty-first century. The volume is alert to continuities and diversity over time and place in the history of American crime, notably in chapters on the South, the West and the impact of urbanization on practices and ideas about crime and law enforcement in different periods of the American past.
The Routledge History of Crime in America is an indispensable, interdisciplinary resource for students and researchers working in areas of crime, crime policy, punishment, policing, and incarceration.
Introduction
James M. Campbell and Vivien Miller
Part 1: Major Themes in American Crime History
1. Defining, Recording, and Measuring Crime in the United States from Colonial Times to the Present
Randolph Roth
2. Theories of Crime in American History
Paul Knepper
3. Crime and Popular Culture in American History
Justin Gifford
4. Policing Crime in American History
Brandon T. Jett
5. Innovation, Continuity, Recycling and Technological Transformation: Punishment in America
Vivien Miller
Part 2: Crime and American Culture
6. Transatlantic Felony: Convict Transportation and Representations of Criminality in the British American Colonies
Matthew Pethers
7. Depictions of Crime in American Cinema, 1903-1936
Nick Heffernan
8. Crime, Popular Culture, and the Media in the 21st Century
Lindsay Steenberg and Simon McFadden
Part 3: Histories of American Violence
9. “The Penalty of a Tyrant’s Law”: Slavery and Crime in the Nineteenth Century American South
James M. Campbell
10. Crime and Punishment in a 19th Century Western Community
Michael Alarid
11. “The American City is becoming a Menace to State and Nation”: Urban Crime in the Age of Jim Crow and Mass Immigration
Jeffrey S. Adler
12. American Serial Killers
Bernice M. Murphy
Part 4: Class, Gender and Crime in the Long Nineteenth Century
13. “Relieving the city from beggars and the poor”: The Criminalization of Poverty and Mobility in the Long Nineteenth Century
Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan
14. Gender and Crime in the Long Nineteenth Century
Felicity Turner
15. White Collar Crime in the Long Nineteenth Century
Bruce E. Baker
Part 5: Organized Crime
16. Pirates and Piracy in Colonial America and the Atlantic World
Rebecca Simon
17. Organised Crime and Race in the US, 1865-1941
Kristoffer Allerfeldt
18. “Wicked” and “Sham”: The evolution of “organized crime” and Its Control in the United States, 1929-Present
Michael Woodiwiss
19. Women and Organised Crime
Emily Green
Part 6: Crime and Policing
20. State Building, Settler Colonialism, and Policing the Nineteenth Century American West
Jonathan Obert
21. Federal Crimes and Policing in the Early-Twentieth Century
Jessica R. Pliley
22. Race, Crime, and Policing in the United States from the War on Crime to the War on Drugs
Max Felker-Kantor
Part 7: Science, Technology and Crime
23. Scientific Knowledge and Crime in Nineteenth-Century America
Courtney E. Thompson
24. Crime Scene Photography in the Twentieth Century
Catriona Byers
Part 8: Crime and Punishment
25. Penal Reform in the Early United States
Ashley T. Rubin
26. Capital Crimes and the Death Penalty, 1860-1960
Seth Kotch
Part 9: Crime, Politics and Governance since the 1960s
27. Conflict or Consensus? The Politicization of Law and Order in the United States since 1960
Joe Merton
28. Governing Through Crime in the 21st Century
Sarah DiMagno and Jonathan Simon
Biography
James Campbell is Associate Professor of American History at the University of Leicester, UK. He has published on histories of crime, punishment and law in the United States, Jamaica and the British Empire and is currently working on the history of the death penalty and its abolition in Britain’s last colonies.
Vivien Miller is Professor of American History at the University of Nottingham, UK. Her publications cover murder, rape, kidnapping, fraud, theft, convict leasing, chain gangs, prisons, capital punishment, organized crime and racetrack corruption. She is currently working on the history of acid crime in the urban-industrial United States.
