1st Edition

The Routledge History of Crime in America

Edited By James Campbell, Vivien Miller Copyright 2025
516 Pages 42 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

516 Pages 42 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

516 Pages 42 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

Covering a broad chronology from the colonial era to the present, this volume’s 28 chapters reflect the diverse approaches, interests and findings of an international group of new and established scholars working on American crime histories today.  The book is organized around major themes in crime history, including violence, science and technology, culture, gender and organized crime,... Read more

Introduction

James M. Campbell and Vivien Miller 

Part 1: Major Themes in American Crime History

1. Defining, Recording, and Measuring Crime in the United States from Colonial Times to the Present

Randolph Roth

2. Theories of Crime in American History

Paul Knepper

3. Crime and Popular Culture in American History

Justin Gifford

4. Policing Crime in American History

Brandon T. Jett

5. Punishment in America: Innovation, Continuity, Recycling and Technological Transformation

Vivien Miller

Part 2: Crime and American Culture

6. Transatlantic Felony: Convict Transportation and Representations of Criminality in the British American Colonies

Matthew Pethers

7. Depictions of Crime in American Cinema, 1903-1936

Nick Heffernan

8. Crime, Popular Culture, and the Media in the 21st Century

Lindsay Steenberg and Simon McFadden

Part 3: Histories of American Violence

9. “The Penalty of a Tyrant’s Law”: Slavery and Crime in the Nineteenth Century American South

James M. Campbell

10. Crime and Punishment in a 19th Century Western Community

Michael Alarid

11. “The American City is becoming a Menace to State and Nation”: Urban Crime in the Age of Jim Crow and Mass Immigration

Jeffrey S. Adler

12. American Serial Killers

Bernice M. Murphy

Part 4: Class, Gender and Crime in the Long Nineteenth Century

13. “Relieving the city from beggars and the poor”: The Criminalization of Poverty and Mobility in the Long Nineteenth Century

Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan

14. Making Women Visible: Gender, Race, and Crime in Nineteenth-Century America

Felicity Turner

15. White Collar Crime in the Long Nineteenth Century

Bruce E. Baker

Part 5: Organized Crime

16. Pirates and Piracy in Colonial America and the Atlantic World

Rebecca Simon

17. Organised Crime and Race in the US, 1865-1941

Kristoffer Allerfeldt

18. “Wicked” and “Sham”: The evolution of “organized crime” and Its Control in the United States, 1929-Present

Michael Woodiwiss

19. Women and Organised Crime

Emily Green

Part 6: Crime and Policing

20. State Building, Settler Colonialism, and Policing the Nineteenth Century American West

Jonathan Obert

21. Federal Crimes and Policing in the Early-Twentieth Century

Jessica R. Pliley

22. Race, Crime, and Policing in the United States from the War on Crime to the War on Drugs

Max Felker-Kantor

Part 7: Science, Technology and Crime

23. Scientific Knowledge and Crime in Nineteenth-Century America

Courtney E. Thompson

24. Crime Scene Photography in the Twentieth Century

Catriona Byers

Part 8: Crime and Punishment

25. Penal Reform in the Early United States

Ashley T. Rubin

26. Capital Crimes and the Death Penalty, 1860-1960

Seth Kotch

Part 9: Crime, Politics and Governance since the 1960s

27. Conflict or Consensus? The Politicization of Law and Order in the United States since 1960

Joe Merton

28. Governing Through Crime in the 21st Century

Sarah DiMagno and Jonathan Simon

Biography

James Campbell is Associate Professor of American History at the University of Leicester, UK. He has published on histories of crime, punishment and law in the United States, Jamaica and the British Empire and is currently working on the history of the death penalty and its abolition in Britain’s last colonies.

Vivien Miller is Professor of American History at the University of Nottingham, UK. Her publications cover murder, rape, kidnapping, fraud, theft, convict leasing, chain gangs, prisons, capital punishment, organized crime and racetrack corruption. She is currently working on the history of acid crime in the urban-industrial United States.