Criminal Violence in America: The First Hundred Years

Abstract

America has long been notorious for its vio lence, but illegitimate criminal violence has received rela tively little attention. Vigilantism is the best known of the specifically American forms of social violence. Woven deeply into our history, bound up in the westward movement, the gun culture, and slavery, vigilantism in its wider sense was an important form of political expression. Mob violence reached its apogee in the North before the Civil War, but con tinued to flourish in the South and West through 1876 and gave the whole nation a heritage of direct action in the name of justice. Gunfighting has been less important in our actual history, but very significant in our national imagination. The gunfighting mystique, and our fascination with it, has con tributed heavily to our tradition of violence. Urban riot and crime are new fields of study, drawing heavily on interdisci plinary methods. Recent work on the city of Philadelphia, for example, may be used in several ways. The nature of collective violence reveals something about the city's own polity and, in connection with other studies of individual violence, something about social and economic stages of development. In brief, all sorts of street violence decreased with the Industrial Revolution, and the Centennial City was quieter than any earlier.