Nowhere in the world does murder so preoccupy the popular imagination as in the United States. Living in a nation which has the highest homicide rate in the Western world, Americans are plagued by fears of serial killers, terrorism, drive-by shootings and workplace killings.
These anxieties exert a profound influence on American politics and society, affect where Americans choose to live and work, and determine much about how Americans of different races and classes relate to each other. Despite the fact that criminal homicide has been an ever-present reality in American society since the nation was founded, murder has received little attention from historians.
This changes with Roger Lane's Murder in America, the first serious history of the subject. An award-winning social historian, Lane has written several books about crime, law enforcement and ethnic history in the United States.
Working from pre-colonial times to the trial of O.J. Simpson, Lane covers the long history of violence in the making of America. His discussion ranges from the eradication of Native American societies and the establishment of slavery to the development of an American "gun culture". Along the way he addresses family homicides, lynchings, urban race riots (which include attacks against Irish immigrants as well as against blacks), political assassinations, and war.
Lane explores the changing responses of the American justice system to murder. One way he does this is by bringing together the stories of important and highly-publicised murder cases, such as the trial of Lizzie Borden, the most famous accused murderer in American history before O.J.
Borden was found not guilty of the axe murder of her father and step-mother in 1892, despite the fact that she was widely believed to be the culprit. She was immortalised in the children's rhyme, "Lizzie Borden took an axe/And gave her father forty whacks;/When she saw what she had done/She gave her mother forty-one."
Other cases Lane discusses are the Salem witchcraft trials in 17th-century Massachusetts, the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants who were tried and executed for murder not so much because they were guilty but because they were radicals, and the case of Leopold and Loeb, two privileged teenagers who shocked the nation in the 1920s when they killed a young boy for the thrill of it. Lane's primary concern in this book is to explain what causes murder rates to go up or down.
He rejects the current thinking that points to the prevalence of guns, the crowding of people into large cities, or the decline of morality and religious faith as the primary causes of interpersonal violence.
To prove his point, Lane compares America to Medieval England, where murder was twice as common as it is in the United States today. Medieval England was a society with no guns, little urban crowding, and a high respect for religion, yet it was plagued with an extremely high murder rate.
Lane abhors the wide availability of guns in the United States today, but he concludes that the prevalence of murder in America is the result of the racism, violence and poverty that are the legacies of slavery, an institution that brutalised its African-American victims and desensitised the population as a whole.
In Lane's words, the experience of slavery "made Americans historically more likely than other developed peoples to tolerate and even admire the kind of belligerence that leads to violence". Although Murder in America is a scholarly work, it is more than just an account of murder and violence in America.
It is a comprehensive, insightful and engagingly written history of the United States, describing the development of American society from its founding through the post-industrial age.
Ed Hatton is a historian and writer
