The Routledge History of Crime in America by Campbell, James; Miller, Vivien;

Short description:

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. 

Long description:

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.

Table of Contents:

Introduction  Part 1: Major Themes in American Crime History  1. Defining, Recording, and Measuring Crime in the United States from Colonial Times to the Present  2. Theories of Crime in American History  3. Crime and Popular Culture in American History  4. Policing Crime in American History  5. Punishment in America: Innovation, Continuity, Recycling and Technological Transformation   Part 2: Crime and American Culture  6. Transatlantic Felony: Convict Transportation and Representations of Criminality in the British American Colonies  7. Depictions of Crime in American Cinema, 1903-1936  8. Crime, Popular Culture, and the Media in the 21st Century  Part 3: Histories of American Violence  9. “The Penalty of a Tyrant’s Law”: Slavery and Crime in the Nineteenth Century American South  10. Crime and Punishment in a 19th Century Western Community  11. “The American City is becoming a Menace to State and Nation”: Urban Crime in the Age of Jim Crow and Mass Immigration’  12. American Serial Killers  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  14. Making Women Visible: Gender, Race, and Crime in Nineteenth-Century America 15. White Collar Crime in the Long Nineteenth Century  Part 5: Organized Crime  16. Pirates and Piracy in Colonial America and the Atlantic World  17. Organised Crime and Race in the US, 1865-1941  18. “Wicked” and “Sham”: The evolution of “organized crime” and Its Control in the United States, 1929-Present  19. Women and Organised Crime  Part 6: Crime and Policing  20. State Building, Settler Colonialism, and Policing the Nineteenth Century American West  21. Federal Crimes and Policing in the Early-Twentieth Century  22. Race, Crime, and Policing in the United States from the War on Crime to the War on Drugs  Part 7: Science, Technology and Crime  23. Scientific Knowledge and Crime in Nineteenth-Century America  24. Crime Scene Photography in the Twentieth Century  Part 8: Crime and Punishment  25. Penal Reform in the Early United States  26. Capital Crimes and the Death Penalty, 1860-1960  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  28. Governing Through Crime in the 21st Century