You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Finalist for the 2022 Cheiron Book Prize An Organ of Murder explores the origins of both popular and elite theories of criminality in the nineteenth-century United States, focusing in particular on the influence of phrenology. In the United States, phrenology shaped the production of medico-legal knowledge around crime, the treatment of the criminal within prisons and in public discourse, and sociocultural expectations about the causes of crime. The criminal was phrenology’s ideal research and demonstration subject, and the courtroom and the prison were essential spaces for the staging of scientific expertise. In particular, phrenology constructed ways of looking as well as a language for identifying, understanding, and analyzing criminals and their actions. This work traces the long-lasting influence of phrenological visual culture and language in American culture, law, and medicine, as well as the practical uses of phrenology in courts, prisons, and daily life.
In Dorchester Volume II, local author Anthony Mitchell Sammarco continues his detailed look at this diverse town that he began in Volume I, which the Boston Globe hailed as a best-seller. Founded in 1630 by Puritans, Dorchester has experienced spectacular growth over the last few centuries; the Old Colony Railroad and later the Red Line provided impetus for the quick development of this streetcar suburb. From a town of twelve thousand residents in 1870, when it was annexed to the city of Boston, to one hundred thousand at the turn of the century, Dorchester became home to a quarter of a million people by 1930. The development of the town in the period from 1870 to 1920 saw architects, builde...
The Origins of Criminology: A Reader is a collection of nineteenth-century texts from the key originators of the practice of criminology – selected, introduced, and with commentaries by the leading scholar in this area, Nicole Rafter. This book presents criminology as a unique field of study that took root in a context in which urbanization, immigration, and industrialization changed the class structure of Western nations. As relatively homogenous communities became more sharply divided and aware of a bottom-most group, the 'dangerous classes', a new segment of the middle class emerged: professionals involved in the work of social control. Tracing the intellectual origins of criminology to physiognomy, phrenology, and evolutionary theories, this book demonstrates criminology's background in new attitudes toward science and the development of scientific methodologies applicable to social and mental phenomena. Through an expert selection of original texts, it traces the emergence of ‘criminology’ as a new field purporting to produce scientific knowledge about crime and criminals.
Part of Dorchester (extinct now) established as Stoughton on 22 Dec. 1726.