How a society defines crimes and prosecutes criminals illuminates its cultural values, social norms, and political expectations. In Murder Most Russian, Louise McReynolds uses a fascinating series of murders and subsequent trials that took place in the wake of the 1864 legal reforms enacted by Tsar Alexander II to understand the impact of these reforms on Russian society before the Revolution of 1917. For the first time in Russian history, the accused were placed in the hands of juries of common citizens in courtrooms that were open to the press. Drawing on a wide array of sources, McReynolds reconstructs murders that gripped Russian society, from the case of Andrei Gilevich, who advertised for a personal secretary and beheaded the respondent as a way of perpetrating insurance fraud, to the beating death of Marianna Time at the hands of two young aristocrats who hoped to steal her diamond earrings.

As McReynolds shows, newspapers covered such trials extensively, transforming the courtroom into the most public site in Russia for deliberation about legality and justice. To understand the cultural and social consequences of murder in late imperial Russia, she analyzes the discussions that arose among the emergent professional criminologists, defense attorneys, and expert forensic witnesses about what made a defendant's behavior "criminal." She also deftly connects real criminal trials to the burgeoning literary genre of crime fiction and fruitfully compares the Russian case to examples of crimes both from Western Europe and the United States in this period.

Murder Most Russian will appeal not only to readers interested in Russian culture and true crime but also to historians who study criminology, urbanization, the role of the social sciences in forging the modern state, evolving notions of the self and the psyche, the instability of gender norms, and sensationalism in the modern media.

The case of the six Jesuits and two women murdered at Central American University (UCA) in San Salvador on November 16, 1989, has come to signify, by extension, a class-action suit on behalf of the 70,000 people tortured and executed over the course of a decade by the Salvadoran Armed Forces, with the complicity of the government. The identification of all those responsible for the Jesuit murders—the intellectual authors as well as the triggermen—would provide a first step toward purging and reforming a system that has made these kinds of crimes possible. This report by the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, which served as legal counsel to the Jesuits since December 1989, documents the story of the Jesuit murders in the most comprehensive history and analysis to date.

Martha Doggett establishes the background leading up to the murders—the preceding years of human rights abuses and of political distortions promulgated about the Jesuits. She then sifts through the evidence of the crime, scrutinizes the subsequent efforts at cover-up, analyzes the process of the trial itself, and identifies the high-level officials thought to be ultimately responsible for ordering and concealing the truth about the murders. She concludes that a number ofcivilians as well as military paraticlipated and that the decision was made some time before the night of the actual murders. Drawing on primary and journalistic sources, investigative reports, U.S. and Salvadoran government documents, and interviews conducted by the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights and other organizations, Doggett traces the military's repeated obstruction of justice and the ambivalent responses by U.S. officials courting political expediency. She observes the effects of international protests (including the report by U.S. Congressman Joe Moakley) and outlines the limitations inherent in El Salvador's legal system.

Bringing the chronicle up to the present, this volume includes the first published English-language translation of the portion of the Truth Commission report dealing with the Jesuits' case, an analysis of the Truth Commission's conclusions, and reactions to the amnesty and release from prison of all persons convicted for the crime. Appendixes include chronologies of the case and of attacks on El Salvador's Jesuits; lists of the names of all the persons figuring in the case and profiles of the defendants; the report of the Lawyers Committee's trial observer; and a list of previous publications on the case by the Lawyers Committee and UCA, as well as reports of trial observers from other organizations.

Born to an illustrious Roman family in 125 BCE, Regilla was married at the age of fifteen to Herodes, a wealthy Greek. Twenty years later--and eight months pregnant with her sixth child--Regilla died under mysterious circumstances, after a blow to the abdomen delivered by Herodes's freedman. Though Herodes was charged, he was acquitted. Pomeroy's investigation suggests that despite Herodes's erection of numerous monuments to his deceased wife, he was in fact guilty of the crime.

Though suicide is an individual act, Richard Bell reveals its broad social implications in early America. From Revolution to Reconstruction, everyone—parents, newspapermen, ministers and abolitionists alike—debated the meaning of suicide as a portent of danger or of possibility in a new nation struggling to define itself and its power.

Rape is common during wartime, but even within the context of the same war, some armed groups perpetrate rape on a massive scale while others never do. In Rape during Civil War Dara Kay Cohen examines variation in the severity and perpetrators of rape using an original dataset of reported rape during all major civil wars from 1980 to 2012. Cohen also conducted extensive fieldwork, including interviews with perpetrators of wartime rape, in three postconflict counties, finding that rape was widespread in the civil wars of the Sierra Leone and Timor-Leste but was far less common during El Salvador's civil war.

Cohen argues that armed groups that recruit their fighters through the random abduction of strangers use rape—and especially gang rape—to create bonds of loyalty and trust between soldiers. The statistical evidence confirms that armed groups that recruit using abduction are more likely to perpetrate rape than are groups that use voluntary methods, even controlling for other confounding factors. Important findings from the fieldwork—across cases—include that rape, even when it occurs on a massive scale, rarely seems to be directly ordered. Instead, former fighters describe participating in rape as a violent socialization practice that served to cut ties with fighters’ past lives and to signal their commitment to their new groups. Results from the book lay the groundwork for the systematic analysis of an understudied form of civilian abuse. The book will also be useful to policymakers and organizations seeking to understand and to mitigate the horrors of wartime rape.

The uproar over "legitimate rape" during the 2012 U.S. elections confirms that rape remains a word in flux, subject to political power and social privilege. Redefining Rape describes the forces that have shaped the meaning of sexual violence in the U.S., through the experiences of accusers, assailants, and advocates for change.

In 1806 an anxious crowd of thousands descended upon Lenox, Massachusetts, for the public hanging of Ephraim Wheeler, condemned for the rape of his thirteen-year-old daughter, Betsy. Not all witnesses believed justice had triumphed. The death penalty had become controversial; no one had been executed for rape in Massachusetts in more than a quarter century. Wheeler maintained his innocence. Over one hundred local citizens petitioned for his pardon--including, most remarkably, Betsy and her mother.

Impoverished, illiterate, a failed farmer who married into a mixed-race family and clashed routinely with his wife, Wheeler existed on the margins of society. Using the trial report to reconstruct the tragic crime and drawing on Wheeler's jailhouse autobiography to unravel his troubled family history, Irene Quenzler Brown and Richard D. Brown illuminate a rarely seen slice of early America. They imaginatively and sensitively explore issues of family violence, poverty, gender, race and class, religion, and capital punishment, revealing similarities between death penalty politics in America today and two hundred years ago.

Beautifully crafted, engagingly written, this unforgettable story probes deeply held beliefs about morality and about the nature of justice.

Table of Contents:

List of Illustrations
Map of Berkshire County, ca. 1800

Introduction: The Ride to the Gallows

1. The Setting
2. The Trial
3. The Daughter
4. The Wife and Mother
5. The Condemned Man
6. The Final Judgment
7. The Execution

Aftermath: People and Memory

Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

Reviews of this book:
History's grand narratives--the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Gold Rush--are always crowd pleasers, but microhistory, on the scale of everyday persons and singular events, draws readers seeking a more intimate encounter. The case unfolded here, of a man executed for raping his daughter, offers such an experience, bringing readers face to face with a family torn by domestic violence and civic authorities struggling with questions of justice. Throughout the book, Brown and Brown...balance a historical perspective on rural Massachusetts in the early 1800s with a sympathetic portrait of each character...Wheeler was hanged two centuries ago, yet the authors effectively demonstrate that there were never uncomplicated solutions to the perennial problems of family violence and criminal justice.
--Publishers Weekly

Reviews of this book:
In a forceful reminder of just how long Americans have debated the morality of capital punishment, two gifted historians revisit a post-Revolutionary Massachusetts community struggling to adjudicate the ugly case of a dissolute sailor and farmhand--one Ephraim Wheeler--accused of raping his daughter. Careful scrutiny of the evidence leaves little doubt about Wheeler's guilt. Still, a community anxious to distance itself from the bloody rigor of contemporary British jurisprudence was troubled about the justice of ending an almost 30-year hiatus of executions for rape...[Brown and Brown] illuminate sufficient humanity to account for the petitions from 103 local residents for clemency. But the governor refused to intervene. And so the taut narrative of Wheeler's last moments--the sudden release of the supporting plank, the jerk of the rope, the frantic death struggle of the suspended man--leaves modern readers wrestling with the same questions that troubled nineteenth-century witnesses of the harrowing event.
--Bryce Christensen, Booklist

Reviews of this book:
There were hundreds of people filling the church, the Browns write, as Wheeler, his wrists and ankles in chains, "clanked his way forward to the seat before the pulpit on the rough pine coffin he was scheduled to occupy." It is such details--all evoking the hill-country life of early 19th-century Berkshire County--that give The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler color and vibrancy...From contemporary reports, the Browns...have assembled a richly nuanced account...and place the trial in its social and political context.
--Michael Kenney, Boston Globe

Reviews of this book:
As the Browns sensitively piece together this meticulously researched history, we see how the marginal life stories of the Wheelers clashed with the mainstream ambitions of government officials, lawyers and clergymen. The dynamic interplay of personalities, politics and principles determined not only what happened but also the severity of the punishment. This is a very insightful book.
--Lester P. Lee, Jr., Times Literary Supplement

The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler is a haunting book that will engage the reader at every level--analytical, historical, and above all emotional. With exceptional insight and rare grace, the Browns describe an early republic at least as compelling and perhaps more real than the glamour of the Founding Fathers.
--Jon Butler, author of Becoming America

In small places, a sordid crime, and a shattered family, Irene and Richard Brown find the pieces to craft a haunting and powerful tale that illuminates the dark corners of the early republic. Thoroughly researched and crisply narrated, The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler insightfully explores the interplay of elite journalists, lawyers, judges, and politicians with a hardscrabble family violently wrenched into a tragic melodrama of American crime and punishment.
--Alan Taylor, University of California, Davis

The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler is an absolute gem, through which elemental shafts of human experience are powerfully refracted. Like most microhistories, it spotlights a remarkable story. But, more than most, it touches themes and trends of the widest significance: race, class, and gender; justice and vengeance; love and hate; good and evil. And, perhaps more than any, it discloses the mysterious blend of sharing and difference that underlies all our relations to the past.
--John Demos, Yale University

Irene and Richard Brown tell their chilling story with clarity, drama, and compassion. Melding family history with social and political history, they show how small decisions by ordinary people can reshape public debate, and they show the instability as well as the power of that old triad race, class, and gender.
--Laurel Ulrich, author of A Midwife's Tale

Through the case of Ephraim Wheeler, Irene and Richard Brown give us new entry into the worlds of early nineteenth-century New England: of the laborer Ephraim and his wife, Hannah, a woman of color; of the judges who condemned him for raping his daughter; of the governor of Massachusetts, who refused to pardon him. The Browns' deep digging and careful reconstruction show us family struggles among the poor, sexual disorder, the power of patriarchy, quarrels about the death penalty, and much more. A stunning achievement in family history and the history of law--and a marvelous read.
--Natalie Zemon Davis, author of The Return of Martin Guerre(/otherhuptitle>

The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler is at once a stark human drama superbly well told and a work of exceptional scholarship. The setting is that of Ethan Frome, and in all the book casts something of the same haunting spell, except that here the story is true in every detail. My admiration for the skillful and consistently fair-minded way Irene and Richard Brown have rendered the story could not be greater.
--David McCullough, author of John Adams

The Puritans were not as busy policing their neighbors’ behavior as Nathaniel Hawthorne or many early American historians would have us believe. Keeping their own households in line occupied too much of their time. Under Household Government reveals that family members took on the role of watchdogs in matters of sexual indiscretion.

It was 1869 and Sarah Moses, with "a very black eye," told her father: The world will never know what trouble I have seen. What she'd seen was violence at the hands of her husband. Does the world know any more of such things today than it did in Sarah's time?

Sarah, it so happens, lived in Oregon, that Edenic state on the Pacific Coast, and it is here that David Peterson del Mar centers his history of violence against wives. What causes such violence? Has it changed over time? How does it relate to the state of society as a whole? And how have women tried to stop it, resist it, escape it? These are the questions Peterson del Mar pursues, and the answers he finds are as fascinating as they are disturbing.

Thousands of thickly documented divorce cases from the Oregon circuit courts let us listen to voices who often go unheard. These are the people who didn't keep diaries or leave autobiographies, who sometimes could not write at all. Here they speak of a society that quietly condoned wife beating until the spread of an ethos of self-restraint in the late nineteenth century. And then, Peterson del Mar finds, the practice increased with a vengeance with the florescence of expressive individualism during the twentieth century.

What Trouble I Have Seen also traces a dramatic shift in wives' response to their husbands' violence. Settler and Native American women commonly fought abusive mates. Most wives of the late nineteenth century acted more cautiously and relied on others for protection. But twentieth-century privatism, Peterson del Mar discovers, often isolated modern wives from family and neighbors, casting abused women on the mercy of the police, women's shelters, and, most important, their own resources. Thus a new emphasis on self-determination, even as it stimulated violence among men, enhanced the ability of women to resist and escape violent husbands.

The first sustained history of violence toward wives, What Trouble I Have Seen offers remarkable testimony to the impact of social trends on the most private arrangements, and the resilience of women subject to a seemingly timeless crime.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments

Prologue

"To Maintain His Authority": The Settlement Era
"When a Man Stoops to Strike a Woman": The 1890s
"His Face Is Weak and Sensual": Portland and the Whipping Post Law
"To Use His Muscle on Her": 1920-1945
"We Found That We Were Not Alone": The Years after World War II

Conclusion

Appendix: Quantitative Measures
Abbreviations
Notes
Index

Reviews of this book:
Del Mar offers a history of woman battering in Oregon that is compassionate, richly detailed, [and] complex...The richness of this historical examination will be of great interest to scholars and students of gender, family life, and violence against women.
--James Ptacek, Contemporary Sociology

Reviews of this book:
This is a fascinating book, with a bold and clear argument and a host of insights into family life and standards...It is stimulating, often plausible, and important.
--Peter N. Stearns, American Historical Review

Reviews of this book:
What Trouble I Have Seen weaves together an extraordinary mix of contradictory threads in the histories of violence, westward expansion, race, economics, gender roles, work, attitudes about marriage and women, and changes in the economy to explain historical changes in violence against wives. It is both a local history of Oregon and a larger social analysis of changing national patterns. It is solid scholarship with an activist aim at understanding the problem in order to solve it. The complexity of Peterson Del Mar's argument is commendable. He covers the incidence and nature of male violence against wives, women's resistance to it and societal interventions in violent marriages...What Trouble I Have Seen is an immensely useful book. Peterson Del Mar's thesis regarding historical changes in the level and nature of violence against wives is a much needed contribution, as he ties together disparate changes in society. His careful reading of legal documents blended with a variety of popular culture sources gives us greater insight into the problem.
--Deborah L. Kitchen, Journal of American Culture

Reviews of this book:
What Trouble I Have Seen is informed by the author's wide reading in anthropology and related disciplines which offer insight into domestic violence and, unusually, by a year Peterson del Mar spent as a counsellor to abusive men. No doubt that work heightened his sensitivity to some of the issues; it also led him to conclude that the beliefs of abusive men regarding women are not much different from those of other men...This is an ambitious and important book, the first detailed study of wife abuse in one state over a long period.
--Jerome Nadelahft, Canadian Review of American Studies

Reviews of this book:
In What Trouble I Have Seen, Peterson Del Mar paints an extraordinary landscape of men's violence against wives, the forms of women's resistance to male violence, and nonviolent men's complicity with the ideas that underpin such violence...Peterson Del Mar's writing is clear and often moving. His effective use of the testimonies of those who have seen trouble, those who have meted out trouble, and those who have relegated it makes this a compelling read.
--Carole J. Sheffield, Signs

Reviews of this book:
[A] groundbreaking study...David Peterson del Mar has succeeded in his aim of bringing research in this tender subject to the fore. He has produced a book of notable worth containing research that is highly readable, thought-provoking and relevant to modern society.
--Icarus [UK]

A fascinating and rich study of violence against women, meticulously researched and replete with the voices of men and women who offer insights into their own lives and struggles. Peterson del Mar has crafted a careful social history, one in which he argues and demonstrates cogently that violence against wives and wives' response to that violence have varied over time and have always been shaped by the social context--material, ideological, environmental, political.
--Regina Morantz-Sanchez, University of Michigan

Provides a historical framework for understanding domestic abuse that shows how the climate of the times shapes the way we understand [such] abuse.
--Elizabeth Pleck, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign