Turn-of-the century Argentine political leaders were deeply influenced by new ideas about the origin and treatment of criminality developed by the Italian positivist school of criminology. According to this school, crime was not the fruit of the criminal's wickedness, as classic penology had claimed, but was rather the result of a complex web of social and psycho-biological determinations of which the criminal had been a victim. This pathology called “crime” could be corrected if its origin was scientifically determined and if the new methods of rehabilitation prescribed for criminals and potential criminals were enforced. Although not all of the premises of the criminological school led by Lombroso, Ferri, and Garofalo were accepted uncritically in Argentina, the basic principles of the new science were widely adopted by jurists, doctors, hygienists and psychiatrists. These ideas were received in the context of massive European immigration, accelerated urbanization, and the emergence of a large working class.

This essay examines newspapers in late nineteenth-century Buenos Aires in order to analyze the effects of the submarine telegraph cable. After a brief description of the cable's installation, I analyze how international news was circulated, focusing particularly on the role of Havas, the first European press agency to provide such news to South America. The analysis focuses on two dimensions of the submarine cable's effect: changes in the spatial breadth of news coverage, and the acceleration of news circulation. In critical dialogue with the scholarly literature on this topic, the essay argues that the incorporation of the press into the submarine cable network was part of a long process that introduced extremely fragmented representations of the world and placed new reading demands on South American news consumers.

Based on a presentation delivered in a cycle of conferences about the archive, this text offers a general appraisal of the multiple dynamic s converging on this issue in the present. The second part of the text analyzes a particular dimmension of this process as it develops in Argentina, namely, the impact of the digital archive on the reconstruction of the past.

This book is an extraordinary work of scholarship from one of Argentina's leading historians of modern Buenos Aires society and culture. In the late nineteenth century, the city saw a massive population boom and large-scale urban development. With these changes came rampant crime, a chaotic environment in the streets, and intense class conflict. In response, the state expanded institutions that were intended to bring about social order and control. This book mines both police records and true crime reporting to bring to life the underworld pistoleros, the policemen who fought them, and the crime journalists who brought the conflicts to light. In the process, the book crafts a new portrait of the rise of one of the world's greatest cities.