Introduction

The act of murder is older than the species, and our fascination with it extends as far back as we can dig. Stories about socially sanctioned homicide, or war, go back at least to our oldest epics, designed to record whatever we wished to remember most. Once we learned to write history instead of recite it, its very backbone remained some combination of the celebration and the analysis of warfare–together with politics, its extension. The end of that era, which began with Thucydides, roughly coincided with the founding of the Social Science History Association. Since then, as the study of socially sanctioned homicide has waned, the study of criminal homicide has waxed.

Whatever the preferred definition of "social science history," anxious subject of the winter 1999 edition of this journal, the history of crime in general and of homicide in particular fits perfectly under its rubric. Criminal history is and has always been interdisciplinary, it is as quantitative as the sources allow, and it approaches society from the bottom up.

Orientation from the bottom is the most obvious of these three simple propositions. Those of us who study murder professionally are on the whole indistinguishable from our peers: mild-mannered academics, no more psychologically aberrant than other members of the Social Science History Association, we are interested in the particulars of death only because of what they tell us about life, and especially about life among those about whom little otherwise can be known. With some spectacular exceptions–more of them involving homicide than, say, burglary or shoplifting–crime is either the business of the poor and marginal, or, except in those advanced societies that have outlawed lethal violence as a means of preserving status, the means of keeping others poor and marginal. Of race, class, and gender–the holy trinity of contemporary academe–we then find ourselves centrally concerned with race and class, and focus less often on gender, homicide being a "guy thing" on the whole.

In fact, what most distinguishes homicide is that as an event that is relatively rare and generally thought interesting, it attracts more attention than other forms of crime, and the surviving evidence, whether in the form of execution sermons, printed confessions, true-crime pamphlets, or trial transcripts, often allows us access to people, and matters, that more traditional sources do not. (As a youngster, I was introduced to one form of social history, the sense that the most homely matters are subject to change, via Edmund Pearson’s classic account of the Lizzie Borden case. Textbooks and teachers had taught me that once upon a time, political issues were different, and so were the presidents, some of them a little funny looking. But it was Pearson’s account of the appalling meal served in the Borden household on a sweltering August morning in 1892 that precipitated an epiphany, making me for the first time aware–even in terms of such bedrock matters as breakfast: where was the O.J.? the cereal?–that nearly everything was fluid over time.)

In interpreting homicide and other criminal behavior, the discipline to which most of us "social science" historians owe most is still sociology, and during the nineteenth century the founding fathers of sociology were as obsessed with crime as historians were neglectful. All of the Germans were concerned with the results of rapid social change, of the transition from gemeinschaft to geshellschaft, feudalism to capitalism, ascription to merit. They believed that their own century was especially prone to social pathology, that increased criminal behavior was a necessary result of urbanization and other assaults on the traditional order.

On this side of the Atlantic, early sociologists, less theoretical and more optimistic than the Europeans, virtually defined the discipline as the science of social problems and their solution. Criminology was then an especially important subset, and the criminologists of the mid-twentieth century, in a discipline that is ironically more given to honoring its own history than ours, are still respected and often cited.

The first serious...