Category: Readings

Edward Ayers, Vengeance & Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th-Century American South (1984) Edward Ayers, in Vengeance & Justice, explores the rates and types of crime patterns in the South. Broadly, he is taking a quantitative approach to understand how crime and punishment fit together, how they changed before and after the Civil War,…

Benjamin Reiss, Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums & Nineteenth-Century American Culture (2008) Benjamin Reiss, in Theaters of Madness, questions the tensions between confinement and liberty in the early republic through an analysis of the cultural products relating to the asylum. He uses the writings of nineteenth-century literary figures and asylum patients to uncover the character of…

This week, we’re evaluating two vastly different views on homicide in America–one from the perspective of the cultural work done to explain it and an another from the broad statistics and trends associated with the crime.  These readings offer two approaches to how to balance very broad questions that attempt to identify patterns with the…

Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence (1988) Gordon examines trends in family violence in Boston between 1870 to 1960. She argues that family violence is historically and politically constructed (as evidenced from her choice of subtitle.) Further, she states that the definitions of unacceptable family violence developed…

Mary Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920 (1995) Odem analyzes reform and control over young women’s sexuality between 1885 and 1920 through an in-depth study of age-of-consent law reform and the institutions put into place to enforce these new laws at the local level. Through her study…

James Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States, 1994 Trent provides an excellent synthesis and analysis of the history of mental retardation in the United States between the Revolution and 1970. He argues that depending on the time period, the construction of mental deficiency has evolved from a…