The Historiography of American Violence

Abstract

Historians have generally agreed that the United States has always been an extremely violent nation; however, since the 1950s they have been myopic in their treatment of violence in America and have not provided the American people with essential information about their society and culture. Those historians who focused on violence in America, until the 1990s, have focused on only one form of violence—collective social violence. Largely overlooked, and equally significant, are interpersonal violence (including criminal and domestic violence) and the effect of war. This deficiency helps explain why Americans seem genuinely at a loss to understand the nature, character, and frequency of violence in America’s past and present, especially when a high-profile violent incident occurs. This article surveys the historiography of violence in America through the 1990s and examines the contributions of historians and legal scholars who have focused on interpersonal and criminal violence.

Identity and violent death

“…Up until the 1980s such studies typically focused on collective group violence (e.g. lynching, riots), with this emphasis shifting toward individual violence, most typically involving homicide and firearms, in the late 1980s (Johnson, 1973;Leonard and Leonard, 2003;Moses, 1947;Schneider, 1980).…”

“…In a perceptive essay on the historiography of violence, Leonard and Leonard (2003) chart research trends over the past 50 years, noting that many factors have been offered to explain the extraordinary levels of violence in America, with general agreement that race (and racism) has been the primary contributing factor, commensurate with other contributing factors (2003: 121-3). While many social scientists have made careful diachronic studies of violence in America, very few have been able to articulate the fundamental reason(s), at any level, beyond underlying factors such as poverty and race (2003: 133).…”

“I Was There” and “It Happened to Me”: An Exploratory Study of Killing as an Adventure Narrative in the Accounts of Soldiers and Police Officers

“…Much scholarly attention has been directed toward illegal forms of killing. Research on killing has been primarily directed toward deaths that are a result of collective and interpersonal conflict (Leonard & Leonard, 2003), specifically analyzing the different motivations, behaviors, and characteristics of homicides and their offenders (Fox & Levin, 2015). However, a limited amount of work exists on the social processes involved in killing carried out by those who are authorized to do so.…”

Train Robbery

“…Rafter (2004, 2005), for instance, analyzed Victorian-era crimes and criminologists to trace the development of criminological theory. Other scholars have used historical data to analyze patterns and trends in violent offenses (Bowman & Altman, 2002; Leonard & Leonard, 2003). Moule and Decker (2013), for example, examined data from the Boston Special Youth Project in the 1950s in order to understand contemporary gang dynamics.…”