Randolph Roth

Child Murder in New England

Historians often despair of their ability to write histories of child murder, because the crime was easy to commit and conceal. Even today, coroners can determine only in rare instances whether a deceased infant or newborn was suffocated or died of natural causes (Knight 1996: 441–44, 345–60). No reliable test can determine, once decomposition has begun, whether a deceased newborn ever took a breath; and suffocation, unlike strangulation, leaves no physical marks, unless excessive pressure is applied to the face or lips. A murderer needed but a few moments to smother a child and could claim that the child was stillborn, had been accidentally overlain, or had died from natural causes. Unwanted pregnancies could be kept from public notice with the help of family or friends, especially pregnancies that came to term in late winter or early spring, when expectant mothers could live quietly out of the public eye or stay wrapped in heavy clothing. In New England, a large proportion of suspected neonaticides—nearly a quarter—occurred in April or early May, “mud season” in the Yankee vernacular,when people emerged from their long winter “hibernation.”

Is History a Process? Nonlinearity, Revitalization Theory, and the Central Metaphor of Social Science History

Process is a ubiquitous word in social science history. It appears dozens of times in such fundamental texts as Wallace 1969, Hershberg 1969, and Wolf 1982. Social science historians generally use it, as Berkhofer (1969: 169-87, 243-44) observes, to characterize the causes of change and persistence in human communities as organic or mechanical phenomena that are intelligible, general, systematic, repetitive, orderly, and similar in sequence. The concept of process is pivotal to our understanding of the daily flux of human interaction, the workings of institutions, the character of collective action, and the course of social evolution (Turner 1977; Wallace 1970: 165-206).

Measuring Feelings and Beliefs that May Facilitate (or Deter) Homicide A Research Note on the Causes of Historic Fluctuations in Homicide Rates in the United States

The essay seeks to construct measures of feelings and beliefs that may facilitate or deter homicides among unrelated adults. The measures try to quantify political stability, government legitimacy, and fellow feeling along national, religious, or racial lines in the United States from colonial times through the 19th century.

Guns, Gun Culture, and Homicide: The Relationship between Firearms, the Uses of Firearms, and Interpersonal Violence

well-written study of the history of gun ownership and gun use in America, has many themes, but none is more important for contemporary public policy than the relationship between guns and interpersonal violence. Bellesiles argues that before the 185os, relatively few Americans owned guns or knew how to use, repair, or preserve them. As a result, guns contributed little to the homicide rate, which was low everywhere, even in the South and on the frontier, where historians once assumed guns and murder went hand in hand. These patterns changed dramatically, according to Bellesiles, after the Mexican War and especially after the Civil War, when gun ownership became widespread and cultural changes encouraged the use of handguns to command respect and resolve personal and political disputes. The result was an unprecedented wave of gun-related homicides, which has left America to this day with the highest homicide rate of any industrial democracy. Bellesiless thesis has been widely embraced by proponents of gun control and condemned by opponents of firearms regulation. Widespread gun ownership is not the only cause, in Bellesiless opinion, of Americas high homicide rate, but it is a crucial factor, so his thesis has landed at the center of a vigorous public debate.1

Counting Guns: What Social Science Historians Know and Could Learn about Gun Ownership, Gun Culture, and Gun Violence in the United States

At the fall 2001 Social Science History Association convention in Chicago, the Crime and Justice network sponsored a forum on the history of gun ownership, gun use, and gun violence in the United States. Our purpose was to consider how social science historians might contribute nowand in the future to the public debate over gun control and gun rights. To date, we have had little impact on that debate. It has been dominated by mainstream social scientists and historians, especially scholars such as Gary Kleck, John Lott, and Michael Bellesiles, whose work, despite profound flaws, is politically congenial to either opponents or proponents of gun control. Kleck and Mark Gertz (1995), for instance, argue on the basis of their widely cited survey that gun owners prevent numerous crimes each year in theUnited States by using firearms to defend themselves and their property. If their survey respondents are to be believed, American gun owners shot 100,000 criminals in 1994 in selfdefense–a preposterous number (Cook and Ludwig 1996: 57–58; Cook and Moore 1999: 280–81). Lott (2000) claims on the basis of his statistical analysis of recent crime rates that laws allowing private individuals to carry concealed firearms deter murders, rapes, and robberies, because criminals are afraid to attack potentially armed victims. However, he biases his results by confining his analysis to the years between 1977 and 1992, when violent crime rates had peaked and varied little from year to year (ibid.: 44–45). He reports only regression models that support his thesis and neglects to mention that each of those models finds a positive relationship between violent crime and real income, and an inverse relationship between violent crime and unemployment (ibid.: 52–53)–implausible relationships that suggest the presence of multicollinearity, measurement error, or misspecification. Lott then misrepresents his results by claiming falsely that statistical methods can distinguish in a quasi-experimental way the impact of gun laws from the impact of other social, economic, and cultural forces (ibid.: 26, 34–35; Guterl 1996). Had Lott extended his study to the 1930s, the correlation between gun laws and declining homicide rates that dominates his statistical analysis would have disappeared. An unbiased study would include some consideration of alternative explanations and an acknowledgment of the explanatory limits of statistical methods.

American Homicide: Theories, Methods, and Body Counts

In his comments on my book, American Homicide, Robert R. Dykstra (2010, 181–84) declares that my theory is both unoriginal and incorrect, my numbers are questionable, my history is mistaken, and my methodology is worse than useless. Let me go through his claims one by one and at the same time try to give readers a sense of what American Homicide is really about.1 I will first deal with my theory of homicide and its provenance. Dykstra’s critique—like the critique by Jill Lepore (2009), which he quotes at length—begins with the claim that American Homicide is an attempt to “graft” Gary LaFree’s (1998) theory of homicide onto U.S. history. Obviously I admire LaFree’s work, but as I said in the book, his theory in Losing Legitimacy (1998) about the correlation between murder and trust in government only “confirms” one aspect of a more comprehensive theory of homicide that I developed independently (16). I have been presenting aspects of my theory in papers at professional conferences and discussing it with colleagues since 1987, and I articulated it fully in grant applications to the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities before the publication of LaFree’s book.2 For better or worse, the ideas in American Homicide are my own, and to claim otherwise is very odd indeed. The theory of homicide in American Homicide is not a theory about legitimacy alone. Low homicide rates have correlated with at least three other variables: the belief that government is stable and that its legal institutions will protect lives and property; patriotism, empathy, and fellow feeling arising from racial, religious, or political solidarity; and the belief that the social hierarchy is legitimate and enables men to attain a satisfactory position in society and to command the respect of others without resorting to violence. The theory is thus about nation-building in its broadest sense. “America became homicidal in the mid-nineteenth century

Getting Things Wrong Really Does Help, as Long as You Keep Trying to Get Things Right: Developing Theories About Why Homicide Rates Rise and Fall

How can we come up with new ideas in criminology that have a chance of being better than the ideas that have come before? That’s a humbling question for scholars like me, whose insights have been born of failure. It’s a daunting thing, even in a world of tenure, to work for a decade on a project, only to find that the data have made a hash of your hypotheses. As I put it to friends at the time, “my theories died a horrible death in the face of the evidence.” It’s tough to end up with a bigger puzzle than the one you started with and no responsible way to publish what you have found, because the data don’t make sense in light of your initial theories or the theories of your colleagues. But that’s the way many advances in knowledge come about, especially in criminology, where official data are of such poor quality and so limited across time and space that we have to gather our own data, project after project, without knowing what they will reveal. And the data, once gathered, almost always surprise us—indeed, I believe they will always surprise us if we are open to what they can tell us. But that’s a wonderful thing, because it means, as I remind my students constantly, that we don’t have to be geniuses to do original work in criminology. We just have to work long hours and trust that better hypotheses will emerge from the data.

Scientific History and Experimental History

The promise of scientific history and scientifically informed history is more modest today than it was in the nineteenth century, when a number of intellectuals hoped to transform history into a scientific mode of inquiry that would unite the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, and reveal profound truths about human nature and destiny. But Edmund Russell in Evolutionary History and Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson in Natural Experiments of History demonstrate that historians can write interdisciplinary, comparative analyses using the strategies of nonexperimental natural science to search for deep patterns in human behavior and for correlates to those patterns that can lead to a better, though not infallible, understanding of historical causality.

Eric Monkkonen (1942-2005)

Eric Monkkonen, who passed away on May 30, 2005 at the age of 62, was one of the greatest historians ever to write on the history of crime. An urban and social science historian by training, he dedicated his life to understanding the social problems that, like many historians of his generation, he believed most pressing: poverty, prejudice, and violence. He was an iconoclast in his approach to those problems, on good terms with ideologues of all stripes but unwilling to settle for ideological...