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Results by Library of Congress Code
Books near "Savage Portrayals: Race, Media and the Central Park Jogger Story", Library of Congress HV6568.N5.B94
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Murder Scenes: Normality, Deviance, and Criminal Violence in Weimar Berlin
Sace Elder
University of Michigan Press, 2010
Library of Congress HV6535.G33B474 2010 | Dewey Decimal 364.152309431551
"Sace Elder has exhaustively researched both newspaper and other popular and professional treatments of murder cases and archival sources of police investigations and trials in Berlin between 1919 and 1931. Murder Scenes is an innovative and insightful exploration of the ways in which these investigations and trials, and the publicity surrounding them, reflected and shaped changing notions of normality and deviance in Weimar-era Berlin."
---Kenneth Ledford, Case Western Reserve University
Using police reports, witness statements, newspaper accounts, and professional publications, Murder Scenes examines public and private responses to homicidal violence in Berlin during the tumultuous years of the Weimar era. Criminology and police science, both of which became increasingly professionalized over the period, sought to control and contain the blurring of these boundaries but could only do so by relying on a public that was willing to participate in the project. These Weimar developments in police practice in Berlin had important implications for what Elder identifies as an emerging culture of mutual surveillance that was successful both because and in spite of the incompleteness of the system police sought to construct, a culture that in many ways anticipated the culture of denunciation in the Nazi period. In addition to historians of Weimar, modern Germany, and modern Europe, German studies and criminal justice scholars will find this book of interest.
Sace Elder is Associate Professor of History at Eastern Illinois University.
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A Prescription for Murder: The Victorian Serial Killings of Dr. Thomas Neill Cream
Angus McLaren
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Library of Congress HV6535.G6L6564 1993 | Dewey Decimal 364.15230942165
From 1877 to 1892, Dr. Thomas Neill Cream murdered seven women, all prostitutes or patients seeking abortions, in England and North America. A Prescription for Murder begins with Angus McLaren's vividly detailed story of the killings. Using press reports and police dossiers, McLaren investigates the links between crime and respectability to reveal a remarkable range of Victorian sexual tensions and fears. McLaren explores how the roles of murderer and victim were created, and how similar tensions might contribute to the onslaught of serial killing in today's society.
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Who Killed George Polk?: The Press Covers Up a Death in the Family
Elias Vlanton
Temple University Press, 1996
Library of Congress HV6535.G83T485 1996 | Dewey Decimal 364.1523094956
Just weeks after CBS correspondent George Polk was murdered in Greece in 1948, his peers created the "George Polk Award" to honor the best in American journalism. Polk would have been bitterly disappointed, however, had he known that the "best in American journalism" accepted, largely without protest, an investigation into his death in which evidence was not only ignored but manufactured to convict innocent men—an investigation in which politics played a bigger role than the truth.
Reconstructing the murder, investigation, trial, and aftermath, Who Killed George Polk? offers a penetrating analysis of the willingness of the American media—including CBS and a committee of prominent journalists headed by Walter Lippmann—to accept the government's version of events despite numerous inconsistencies. The book also explores the fate of the handful of journalists who had questioned the original coverup and shows that even when additional developments turned the official version on its head, they were no longer in a position to press for a new investigation. All had become victims of anticommunist witchhunts.
Arguing that this mainstream media and the U.S. government were so blinded by cold war political considerations that they overlooked the most obvious culprits for the Polk murder, Elias Vlanton proves that Polk was likely killed neither by the communists, as originally charged, nor by corrupt Greek government officials, as claimed by a recent book and in a CBS "Sixty Minutes" broadcast. Instead, based on evidence uncovered during Vlanton's 19-year investigation, the author presents the only plausible scenario of how and why Polk was murdered.
At its core, this perceptive interrogation explores how the press served U.S. national interests at the expense of the truth and journalistic integrity.
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Habitual Offenders: A True Tale of Nuns, Prostitutes, and Murderers in Seventeenth-Century Italy
Craig A. Monson
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Library of Congress HV6535.I83B658 2016 | Dewey Decimal 364.15230945411
In April 1644, two nuns fled Bologna’s convent for reformed prostitutes. A perfunctory archiepiscopal investigation went nowhere, and the nuns were quickly forgotten. By June of the next year, however, an overwhelming stench drew a woman to the wine cellar of her Bolognese townhouse, reopened after a two-year absence—where to her horror she discovered the eerily intact, garroted corpses of the two missing women.
Drawing on over four thousand pages of primary sources, the intrepid Craig A. Monson reconstructs this fascinating history of crime and punishment in seventeenth-century Italy. Along the way, he explores Italy’s back streets and back stairs, giving us access to voices we rarely encounter in conventional histories: prostitutes and maidservants, mercenaries and bandits, along with other “dubious” figures negotiating the boundaries of polite society. Painstakingly researched and breathlessly told, Habitual Offenders will delight historians and true-crime fans alike.
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More or Less Dead: Feminicide, Haunting, and the Ethics of Representation in Mexico
Alice Driver
University of Arizona Press, 2015
Library of Congress HV6535.M63C59 2015 | Dewey Decimal 791.436556
In Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, people disappear, their bodies dumped in deserted city lots or jettisoned in the unforgiving desert. All too many of them are women.
More or Less Dead analyzes how such violence against women has been represented in news media, books, films, photography, and art. Alice Driver argues that the various cultural reports often express anxiety or criticism about how women traverse and inhabit the geography of Ciudad Juárez and further the idea of the public female body as hypersexualized. Rather than searching for justice, the various media—art, photography, and even graffiti—often reuse victimized bodies in sensationalist, attention-grabbing ways. In order to counteract such views, local activists mark the city with graffiti and memorials that create a living memory of the violence and try to humanize the victims of these crimes.
The phrase “more or less dead” was coined by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño in his novel 2666, a penetrating fictional study of Juárez. Driver explains that victims are “more or less dead” because their bodies are never found or aren’t properly identified, leaving families with an uncertainty lasting for decades—or forever.
The author’s clear, precise journalistic style tackles the ethics of representing feminicide victims in Ciudad Juárez. Making a distinction between the words “femicide” (the murder of girls or women) and “feminicide” (murder as a gender-driven event), one of her interviewees says, “Women are killed for being women, and they are victims of masculine violence because they are women. It is a crime of hate against the female gender. These are crimes of power.”
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Death Foretold: The Jesuit Murders in El Salvador
Martha Doggett
Georgetown University Press, 1993
Library of Congress HV6535.S2D64 1993 | Dewey Decimal 364.152409728409
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.
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Marikana: Voices from South Africa's Mining Massacre
Peter Alexander
Ohio University Press, 2013
Library of Congress HV6535.S63A44 2013 | Dewey Decimal 968.241068
The Marikana Massacre of August 16, 2012, was the single most lethal use of force by South African security forces against civilians since the end of apartheid. Those killed were mineworkers in support of a pay raise. Through a series of interviews conducted with workers who survived the attack, this account documents and examines the controversial shootings in great detail, beginning with a valuable history of the events leading up to the killing of workers, and including eyewitness accounts of the violence and interviews with family members of those who perished.
While the official Farlam Commission investigation of the massacre is still ongoing, many South Africans do not hold much confidence in the government’s ability to examine its own complicity in these events. Marikana, on the other hand, examines the various roles played by the African National Congress, the mine company, and the National Union of Mineworkers in creating the conditions that led to the massacre. While the commission’s investigations take place in a courtroom setting tilted toward those in power, Marikana documents testimony from the mineworkers in the days before official statements were even gathered, offering an unusually immediate and unfiltered look at the reality from the perspective of those most directly affected. Enhanced by vivid maps that make clear the setting and situation of the events, Marikana is an invaluable work of history, journalism, sociology, and activism.
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Death and a Maiden: Infanticide and the Tragical History of Grethe Schmidt
William David Myers
Northern Illinois University Press, 2011
Library of Congress HV6541.G32B736 2011 | Dewey Decimal 364.1523
On the feast of St. Michael, September 1659, a thirteen-year-old peasant girl left her family’s rural home to work as a maid in the nearby city of Braunschweig. Just two years later, Grethe Schmidt found herself imprisoned and accused of murdering her bastard child, even though the fact of her pregnancy was inconclusive and no infant’s body was found to justify the severe measures used against her. The tale spiraled outward to set a defense lawyer and legal theorist against powerful city magistrates and then upward to a legal contest between that city and its overlord, the Duchy of Brunswick, with the city’s independence and ancient liberties hanging in the balance.
Death and a Maiden tells a fascinating story that begins in the bedchamber of a house in Brunswick and ends at the court of Duke Augustus in the city of Wolfenbüttel, with political intrigue along the way. After thousands of pages of testimony and rancorous legal exchange, it is still not clear that any murder happened.
Myers infuses the story of Grethe’s arrest, torture, trial, and sentence for “suspected infanticide,” with a detailed account of the workings of the criminal system in continental Europe, including the nature of interrogations, the process of torture, and the creation of a “criminal” identity over time. He presents an in-depth examination of a criminal system in which torture was both legal and an important part of criminal investigations. This story serves as a captivating slice of European history as well as a highly informative look at the condition of poor women and the legal system in mid-17th century Germany. General readers and scholars alike will be riveted by Grethe’s ordeal.
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The Assassination of Theo van Gogh: From Social Drama to Cultural Trauma
Ron Eyerman
Duke University Press, 2008
Library of Congress HV6541.N4A77 2008 | Dewey Decimal 364.1524092
In November 2004, the controversial Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was killed on a busy street in Amsterdam. A twenty-six-year-old Dutch citizen of Moroccan descent shot van Gogh, slit his throat, and pinned a five-page indictment of Western society to his body. The murder set off a series of reactions, including arson against Muslim schools and mosques. In The Assassination of Theo van Gogh, Ron Eyerman explores the multiple meanings of the murder and the different reactions it elicited: among the Amsterdam-based artistic and intellectual subculture, the wider Dutch public, the local and international Muslim communities, the radical Islamic movement, and the broader international community. After meticulously analyzing the actions and reputations of van Gogh and others in his milieu, the motives of the murderer, and the details of the assassination itself, Eyerman considers the various narrative frames the mass media used to characterize the killing. Eyerman utilizes theories of social drama and cultural trauma to evaluate the reactions to and effects of the murder. A social drama is triggered by a public transgression of taken-for-granted norms; one that threatens the collective identity of a society may develop into a cultural trauma. Eyerman contends that the assassination of Theo van Gogh quickly became a cultural trauma because it resonated powerfully with the postwar psyche of the Netherlands. As part of his analysis of the murder and reactions to it, he discusses significant aspects of twentieth-century Dutch history, including the country’s treatment of Jews during the German occupation, the loss of its colonies in the wake of World War II, its recruitment of immigrant workers, and the failure of Dutch troops to protect Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995.
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What Happened to Christopher: An American Family's Story of Shaken Baby Syndrome
Ann-Janine Morey. Foreword by M. Joan McDermott
Southern Illinois University Press, 1998
Library of Congress HV6541.U6M67 1998 | Dewey Decimal 364.1523
A tragedy and a trial placed Ann-Janine Morey in an ideal position to write this wrenching exploration of the havoc wreaked on a family by Shaken Baby Syndrome. As an alternate juror in a 1995 murder trial in Murphysboro, Illinois, she observed a case that has become too common: that of an adult caregiver shaking to death a baby. A seasoned researcher and published scholar, in this book Morey witnesses the court proceedings firsthand, comes to know the families of the toddler intimately, and augments her observations and interviews through research into Shaken Baby Syndrome. The result is an agonizingly human tale supported by the evidence of science, sociology, and criminology.
Morey's What Happened to Christopher memorializes the short life of nineteen-month-old Christopher Attig (1992–1994). To reveal what Christopher meant to those closest to him, Morey conducts extensive interviews with the child's parents and grand-parents. She also interviews the officials involved in the case to set the scene from a legal and police angle. Gary Lynn Gould, who was convicted of and imprisoned for killing Christopher, did not answer Morey's requests for interviews.
Morey characterizes her investigation as a "story of quiet horror because it takes place in a way and a setting that could be any town and many families." Nonetheless, Morey's narrative skill transforms Christopher into much more than an ordinary child, senselessly slain. He is Christopher, irreplaceable and unique. And by the time she reconstructs Christopher's final days and the aftermath of his murder, Morey has depicted the principals in the case so deftly and imbued them with such humanity that we experience their torment and their hope.
Morey also provides a juror's insight into the trial. By showing what happened to Christopher Attig and by presenting the accumulated findings relative to Shaken Baby Syndrome, she seeks through education to help prevent future deaths like Christopher's.
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The Murder of Regilla
Sarah B Pomeroy
Harvard University Press, 2007
Library of Congress HV6542.P66 2007 | Dewey Decimal 364.1523092
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.
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Myths about Suicide
Thomas Joiner
Harvard University Press, 2010
Library of Congress HV6545.J648 2010 | Dewey Decimal 362.28
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Marx on Suicide
Karl Marx
Northwestern University Press, 1999
Library of Congress HV6545.M276 1999 | Dewey Decimal 362.28
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Before Their Time
Mary Stimming
Temple University Press, 1998
Library of Congress HV6545.2.B44 1999 | Dewey Decimal 155.937
Before Their Time is the first work to present adult children survivors' (defined as eighteen or above at the time of the parent's death) accounts of their loss, grief, and resolution following a parent's suicide. In once section, the book offers the perspectives of sons and daughters on the deaths of mothers; in another, the perspectives of sons and daughters on the deaths of fathers. In a third section, siblings reflect on the shared loss of their mother.
Each of these survivors faces the common difficulties associated with losing a loved one by suicide. They also experience difficulties specific to their status as both adult and child. Topics such as the impact of the parent's suicide on adult children's personal and professional choices, marriages and parenting, sibling and surviving parent relationships are explored with sensitivity and insight. Various coping skills, including humor, are described.
The writers describe feelings of regret and responsibility related to their parent's suicide. They express concern about other family members' vulnerability to suicide. They speak openly about the fears and stresses they face and how they cope with them.
The authors ranged in age from nineteen to thirty-six at the time of the parent's death. Between one and twenty-five years have passed since that tragedy.
In addition to the first-person narratives, the book includes a resource section with a national listing of suicide survivor support groups; an overview of existing research on survivors of suicide by John L. McIntosh, past president of the American Association of Suicidology; and an essay on elderly suicide by David C. Clark, secretary-general, International Association for Suicide, and editor-in-chief of Crisis. The book is introduced with a Foreword by Rev. Charles Rubey, founder and director of Loving Outreach to Survivors of Suicide.
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We Shall Be No More
Richard Bell
Harvard University Press, 2012
Library of Congress HV6548.U5B45 2012 | Dewey Decimal 362.280973
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.
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Redefining Rape
Estelle B. Freedman
Harvard University Press, 2013
Library of Congress HV6561.F74 2013 | Dewey Decimal 364.15320973
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.
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The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler
Irene Quenzler Brown
Harvard University Press, 2003
Library of Congress HV6565.M4B76 2003 | Dewey Decimal 364.1532097441
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 AmericaIn 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 TaleThrough 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
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In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement against Sexual Violence
Kristin Bumiller
Duke University Press, 2008
Library of Congress HV6566.B86 2008 | Dewey Decimal 364.153
In an Abusive State puts forth a powerful argument: that the feminist campaign to stop sexual violence has entered into a problematic alliance with the neoliberal state. Kristin Bumiller chronicles the evolution of this alliance by examining the history of the anti-violence campaign, the production of cultural images about sexual violence, professional discourses on intimate violence, and the everyday lives of battered women. She also scrutinizes the rhetoric of high-profile rape trials and the expansion of feminist concerns about sexual violence into the international human-rights arena. In the process, Bumiller reveals how the feminist fight against sexual violence has been shaped over recent decades by dramatic shifts in welfare policies, incarceration rates, and the surveillance role of social-service bureaucracies. Drawing on archival research, individual case studies, testimonies of rape victims, and interviews with battered women, Bumiller raises fundamental concerns about the construction of sexual violence as a social problem. She describes how placing the issue of sexual violence on the public agenda has polarized gender- and race-based interests. She contends that as the social welfare state has intensified regulation and control, the availability of services for battered women and rape victims has become increasingly linked to their status as victims and their ability to recognize their problems in medical and psychological terms. Bumiller suggests that to counteract these tendencies, sexual violence should primarily be addressed in the context of communities and in terms of its links to social disadvantage. In an Abusive State is an impassioned call for feminists to reflect on how the co-optation of their movement by the neoliberal state creates the potential to inadvertently harm impoverished women and support punitive and racially based crime control efforts.
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Rape in Chicago: Race, Myth, and the Courts
Dawn Rae Flood
University of Illinois Press, 2018
Library of Congress HV6568.C4F56 2012 | Dewey Decimal 364.15320977311
Spanning a period of four tumultuous decades from the mid-1930s through the mid-1970s, this study reassesses the ways in which Chicagoans negotiated the extraordinary challenges of rape, as either victims or accused perpetrators. Drawing on extensive trial testimony, government reports, and media coverage, Dawn Rae Flood examines how individual men and women, particularly African Americans, understood and challenged rape myths and claimed their right to be protected as American citizens--protected by the State against violence, and protected from the State's prejudicial investigations and interrogations. Flood shows how defense strategies, evolving in concert with changes in the broader cultural and legal environment, challenged assumptions about black criminality while continuing to deploy racist and sexist stereotypes against the plaintiffs.
Uniquely combining legal studies, medical history, and personal accounts, Flood pays special attention to how medical evidence was considered in rape cases and how victim-patients were treated by hospital personnel. She also analyzes medical testimony in modern rape trials, tracing the evolution of contemporary "rape kit" procedures as shaped by legal requirements, trial strategies, feminist reform efforts, and women's experiences.
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Savage Portrayals: Race, Media and the Central Park Jogger Story
Natalie Byfield
Temple University Press, 2014
Library of Congress HV6568.N5B94 2013 | Dewey Decimal 364.1532097471
In 1989, the rape and beating of a white female jogger in Central Park made international headlines. Many accounts reported the incident as an example of “wilding”—episodes of poor, minority youths roaming the streets looking for trouble. Police intent on immediate justice for the victim coerced five African-American and Latino boys to plead guilty. The teenage boys were quickly convicted and imprisoned. Natalie Byfield, who covered the case for the New York Daily News, now revisits the story of the Central Park Five from her perspective as a black female reporter in Savage Portrayals.
Byfield illuminates the race, class, and gender bias in the massive media coverage of the crime and the prosecution of the now-exonerated defendants. Her sociological analysis and first-person account persuasively argue that the racialized reportage of the case buttressed efforts to try juveniles as adults across the nation.
Savage Portrayals casts new light on this famous crime and its far-reaching consequences for the wrongly accused and the justice system.
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Improper Advances: Rape and Heterosexual Conflict in Ontario, 1880-1929
Karen Dubinsky
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Library of Congress HV6569.C32O583 1993 | Dewey Decimal 364.153209713
Why do men rape women? This is a question for which there are many political, psychological, and sociological answers, but few historical ones. Improper Advances is one of the first books to explore the history of sexual violence in any country. A study of women, men, and sexual crime in rural and northern Ontario, it expands the terms of current debates about sexuality and sexual violence.
Karen Dubinsky relies on criminal case files, a revealing but largely untapped source for social historians, to retell individual stories of sexual danger—crimes such as rape, abortion, seduction, murder, and infanticide. Her research supports many feminist analyses of sexual violence: that crimes are expressions of power, that courts are prejudiced by the victim's background, and that most assaults occur within the victims' homes and communities.
Dubinsky distinguishes herself from most feminist scholars, however, by refusing to view women solely as victims and sex as a tool of oppression. She finds that these women actively sought and took pleasure in sexuality, but they distinguished between wanted and unwanted sexual encounters and attempted to punish coercive sex despite obstacles in the court system and the community.
Confronting a number of key theoretical and historiographic controversies, including recent debates over sexuality in feminist theory and politics, she challenges current thinking on the history of women, gender, and sexuality.
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Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting
James Kincaid
Duke University Press, 1998
Library of Congress HV6570.K545 1998 | Dewey Decimal 362.76
In Erotic Innocence James R. Kincaid explores contemporary America’s preoccupation with stories about the sexual abuse of children. Claiming that our culture has yet to come to terms with the bungled legacy of Victorian sexuality, Kincaid examines how children and images of youth are idealized, fetishized, and eroticized in everyday culture. Evoking the cyclic elements of Gothic narrative, he thoughtfully and convincingly concludes that the only way to break this cycle is to acknowledge—and confront—not only the sensuality of children but the eroticism loaded onto them.
Drawing on a number of wide-ranging and well-publicized cases as well as scandals involving such celebrities as Michael Jackson and Woody Allen, Kincaid looks at issues surrounding children’s testimonies, accusations against priests and day-care centers, and the horrifying yet persistently intriguing rumors of satanic cults and “kiddie porn” rings. In analyzing the particular form of popularity shared by such child stars such Shirley Temple and Macaulay Culkin, he exposes the strategies we have devised to deny our own role in the sexualization of children. Finally, Kincaid reminds us how other forms of abuse inflicted on children—neglect, abandonment, inadequate nutrition, poor education—are often overlooked in favor of the sensationalized sexual abuse coverage in the news, on daytime TV talk shows, and in the elevators and cafeterias of America each day.
This bold and critically enlightened book will interest readers across a wide range of disciplines as well as a larger general audience interested in American culture.
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Cruel Attachments: The Ritual Rehab of Child Molesters in Germany
John Borneman
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Library of Congress HV6570.4.G3B67 2015 | Dewey Decimal 616.858360651
There is no more seemingly incorrigible criminal type than the child sex offender. Said to suffer from a deeply rooted paraphilia, he is often considered as outside the moral limits of the human, profoundly resistant to change. Despite these assessments, in much of the West an increasing focus on rehabilitation through therapy provides hope that psychological transformation is possible. Examining the experiences of child sex offenders undergoing therapy in Germany—where such treatments are both a legal right and duty—John Borneman, in Cruel Attachments, offers a fine-grained account of rehabilitation for this reviled criminal type.
Carefully exploring different cases of the attempt to rehabilitate child sex offenders, Borneman details a secular ritual process aimed not only at preventing future acts of molestation but also at fundamentally transforming the offender, who is ultimately charged with creating an almost entirely new self. Acknowledging the powerful repulsion felt by a public that is often extremely skeptical about the success of rehabilitation, he challenges readers to confront the contemporary contexts and conundrums that lie at the heart of regulating intimacy between children and adults.
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Telling Incest: Narratives of Dangerous Remembering from Stein to Sapphire
Janice Doane and Devon Hodges
University of Michigan Press, 2001
Library of Congress HV6570.6.D63 2001 | Dewey Decimal 306.877
In the last decade, women's accounts of father-daughter incest have prompted much public debate. Are these accounts true? Are they false? Telling Incest, however, asks a different question: what does a believable incest story sound like and why?
Examining the work of writers from Gertrude Stein to Toni Morrison and Dorothy Allison, Telling Incest argues that an incest story's plausibility depends upon a shifting set of narrative conventions and cultural expectations. As contexts for telling incest stories have changed, so too have the tasks of those who tell and those who listen. The authors analyze both fictional and nonfiction narratives about father-daughter incest, beginning by scrutinizing the shadowy accounts found in nineteenth-century case records, letters, and narratives.
Telling Incest next explores African American stories that shift the blame for incest from the black family to the predations of a paternalistic white culture. Janice Doane and Devon Hodges demonstrate that writers drew upon this reworked incest narrative in the 1970s and early 1980s in order to relate a feminist story about incest, a story that criticizes patriarchal power. This feminist form of the story, increasingly emphasizing trauma and recovery, can be found in such popular books as Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres. Doane and Hodges then examine recent memoirs and novels such as Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina and Sapphire's Push, narratives that again rework the incest story in an effort to "tell" about women's complex experiences of subjugation and hope.
Telling Incest will be of particular interest to readers who have enjoyed the popular and culturally significant work of writers such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Jane Smiley, and Dorothy Allison and to students of women's studies, feminist theory, and cultural studies.
Janice Doane is Professor of English, St. Mary's College of California. Devon Hodges is Professor of English, George Mason University. They have also coauthored From Klein to Kristeva: Psychoanalytic Feminism and the Search for the "Good Enough" Mother and Nostalgia and Sexual Difference: The Resistance to Contemporary Feminism.
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In My Father’s Arms: A Son’s Story of Sexual Abuse
Walter A. de Milly III
University of Wisconsin Press, 2012
Library of Congress HV6570.8.T35D45 1999 | Dewey Decimal 364.1536
first paperback edition:
To the outside world, Walter de Milly's father was a prominent businessman, a dignified Presbyterian, and a faithful husband; to Walter, he was an overwhelming, handsome monster. This paperback edition of In My Father's Arms: A Son's Story of Sexual Abuse adds a reflective preface by the author and a foreword by Richard B. Gartner, author of Beyond Betrayal: Taking Charge of Your Life after Boyhood Sexual Abuse.
"A sensitive and compelling account of father-son incest. In spite of the suffering portrayed, the account also gives testimony to the strength of family bonds, and to the courage and resilience of the human spirit."—Fred S. Berlin, MD, Director of the National Institute for the Study, Prevention and Treatment of Sexual Trauma
"This is the most detailed and utterly plausible account I've ever read of what it feels like to be an abused child, and it is told with cinematic presence and verisimilitude. The anger, the love, the evasiveness and jealousy and confusion, the need to dissociate oneself from one's own actions and reactions—all are presented in a harrowing narrative, which is as tragic as a Greek drama and as engrossing as a Victorian novel. The unexpected element in this book—which falls on it like manna—is its nourishing, exquisite lyricism."—Edmund White, author of A Boy's Own Story
cloth:
"Walter de Milly has written a sensitive and compelling account of father-son incest. In spite of the suffering portrayed, the account also gives testimony to the strength of family bonds, and to the courage and resilience of the human spirit."—Fred S. Berlin, M.D., Director of the National Institute for the Study, Prevention and Treatment of Sexual Trauma
"This is the most detailed and utterly plausible account I've ever read of what it feels like to be an abused child, and it is told with cinematic presence and verisimilitude. The anger, the love, the evasiveness and jealousy and confusion, the need to dissociate oneself from one's own actions and reactions—all are presented in a harrowing narrative, which is as tragic as a Greek drama and as engrossing as a Victorian novel. The unexpected element in this book—which falls on it like manna—is its nourishing, exquisite lyricism."—Edmund White
The TV-perfect family of Walter de Milly III was like many others in the American South of the 1950s—seemingly close-knit, solidly respectable, and active in the community.
Tragically, Walter's deeply troubled father would launch his family on a perilous journey into darkness. To the outside world, this man is a prominent businessman, a dignified Presbyterian, and a faithful husband; to Walter, he is an overwhelming, handsome monster. Whenever the two are together, young Walter becomes a sexual plaything for his father; father and son outings are turned into soul-obliterating nightmares.
Walter eventually becomes a successful businessman only to be stricken by another catastrophe: his father, at the age of seventy, is caught molesting a young boy. Walter is asked to confront his father. Walter convenes his family, and in a private conference with a psychiatrist, the father agrees to be surgically castrated.
De Milly's portraits of his relationships with his father and mother, and the confrontation that leads to his father's bizarre and irreversible voluntary "cure," are certain to be remembered long after the reader has set aside this powerful contribution to the literature of incest survival.
Walter de Milly is a writer living in Key West, Florida.
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Anatomy of a Kidnapping: A Doctor's Story
Steven L. Berk, M.D.
Texas Tech University Press, 2011
Library of Congress HV6574.U6B47 2011 | Dewey Decimal 364.154092
Four hours. That was the amount of time between looking down the barrel of a gun and finding myself free along a silent highway lined by cotton fields. In the time period that seemed eternal, my unique experiences as a doctor created an indescribable bond between myself and my captor. I looked upon the situation just as I looked upon a medical emergency: I took a deep breath, hid my panic, and tried to solve the situation.
In March 2005, Dr. Steven Berk was kidnapped in Amarillo, Texas, by a dangerous and enigmatic criminal who entered his home, armed with a shotgun, through an open garage door. Dr. Berk’s experiences and training as a physician, especially his understanding of Sir William Osler’s treatise on aequanimitas, enabled him to keep his family safe, establish rapport with his kidnapper, and bring his captor to justice.
This harrowing story is not just about a kidnapping. It is a story about patients, about physicians, and about what each experience has taught Berk about life and death, mistakes, family, the practice of medicine, and the physician-patient relationship. It is a story about how Berk's profession prepared him for an unpredictable situation and how any doctor must address life’s uncertainties.
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West of Sex: Making Mexican America, 1900-1930
Pablo Mitchell
University of Chicago Press, 2012
Library of Congress HV6592.M58 2012 | Dewey Decimal 364.15309790904
Sex can be an oppressive force, a tool to shame, divide, and control a population. But it can also be a force for change, for the legal and physical challenge of inequity and injustice. In West of Sex, Pablo Mitchell uses court transcripts and criminal cases to provide the first coherent picture of Mexican-American sexuality at the turn of the twentieth century, and a truly revelatory look at sexual identity in the borderlands.
As Mexicans faced a rising tide of racial intolerance in the American West, some found cracks in the legal system that enabled them to assert their rights as full citizens, despite institutional hostility. In these chapters, Mitchell offers a rare glimpse into the inner workings of ethnicity and power in the United States, placing ordinary Mexican women and men at the center of the story of American sex, colonialism, and belonging.
Other chapters discuss topics like prostitution, same-sex intimacy, sexual violence, interracial romance, and marriage with an impressive level of detail and complexity. Written in vivid and accessible prose, West of Sex offers readers a new vision of sex and race in American history.
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Under Household Government: Sex and Family in Puritan Massachusetts
M. Michelle Jarrett Morris
Harvard University Press, 2012
Library of Congress HV6592.M67 2012 | Dewey Decimal 364.153097440903
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.
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Violent Sensations: Sex, Crime, and Utopia in Vienna and Berlin, 1860-1914
Scott Spector
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Library of Congress HV6593.E8515S66 2016 | Dewey Decimal 364.153094315509
Around the turn of the twentieth century, Vienna and Berlin were centers of scientific knowledge, accompanied by a sense of triumphalism and confidence in progress. Yet they were also sites of fascination with urban decay, often focused on sexual and criminal deviants and the tales of violence surrounding them. Sensational media reports fed the prurient public’s hunger for stories from the criminal underworld: sadism, sexual murder, serial killings, accusations of Jewish ritual child murder—as well as male and female homosexuality.
In Violent Sensations, Scott Spector explores how the protagonists of these stories—people at society’s margins—were given new identities defined by the groundbreaking sciences of psychiatry, sexology, and criminology, and how this expert knowledge was then transmitted to an eager public by journalists covering court cases and police investigations. The book analyzes these sexual and criminal subjects on three levels: first, the expertise of scientists, doctors, lawyers, and scholars; second, the sensationalism of newspaper scandal and pulp fiction; and, third, the subjective ways that the figures themselves came to understand who they were. Throughout, Spector answers important questions about how fantasies of extreme depravity and bestiality figure into the central European self-image of cities as centers of progressive civilization, as well as the ways in which the sciences of social control emerged alongside the burgeoning emancipation of women and homosexuals.
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Accounts of Innocence: Sexual Abuse, Trauma, and the Self
Joseph E. Davis
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Library of Congress HV6625.D38 2005 | Dewey Decimal 362.76
Since a new sensitivity and orientation to victims of injustice arose in the 1960s, categories of victimization have proliferated. Large numbers of people are now characterized and characterize themselves as sufferers of psychological injury caused by the actions of others. In contrast with the familiar critiques of victim culture, Accounts of Innocence offers a new and empirically rich perspective on the question of why we now place such psychological significance on victimization in people's lives.
Focusing on the case of adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse, Joseph E. Davis shows how the idea of innocence shaped the emergence of trauma psychology and continues to inform accounts of the past (and hopes for the future) in therapy with survivor clients. His findings shed new light on the ongoing debate over recovered memories of abuse. They challenge the notion that victim accounts are an evasion of personal responsibility. And they suggest important ways in which trauma psychology has had unintended and negative consequences for how victims see themselves and for how others relate to them.
An important intervention in the study of victimization in our culture, Accounts of Innocence will interest scholars of clinical psychology, social work, and sociology, as well as therapists and victim activists.
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Women Escaping Violence: Empowerment through Narrative
Elaine J. Lawless
University of Missouri Press, 2001
Library of Congress HV6626.2.L39 2001 | Dewey Decimal 362.82920973
The statistics are alarming. Some say that once every nine minutes a woman in the United States is beaten by her spouse or partner. Others claim that once every four minutes a woman in the world is beaten by her spouse or partner. More women go to emergency rooms in the United States for injuries sustained at the hands of their spouses and partners than for all other injuries combined.
Shelters for battered women are filled beyond capacity every single day of the year. Despite the overwhelming evidence that violence in our homes is a daily reality, most of us are not willing to acknowledge this private violence or talk about it openly. Women Escaping Violence brings women's stories to the attention of the academy as well as the reading public. While we may be unwilling or unable to talk about the issue of battered women, many of us are ready to read what women have to say about their endangered lives.
Considerable scholarship is emerging in the area of domestic violence, including many self-help books about how to identify and escape abuse. Women Escaping Violence offers the unique view of battered women's stories told in their own words, as well as a feminist analysis of how these women use the power of narrative to transform their sense of self and regain a place within the larger society.
Lawless shares with the reader the heart-wrenching experiences of battered women who have escaped violence by fleeing to shelters with little more than a few items hastily shoved into a plastic bag, and often with small children in tow. The book includes women's stories as they are told and retold within the shelter, in the presence of other battered women and of caregivers. It analyzes the uses made of these narratives by those seeking to counsel battered women as well as by the women themselves.
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What Trouble I Have Seen
David PETERSON DEL MAR
Harvard University Press, 1996
Library of Congress HV6626.22.O7P47 1996 | Dewey Decimal 362.829209795
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
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Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial
Emily S. Burrill
Ohio University Press, 2010
Library of Congress HV6626.23.A35D66 2010 | Dewey Decimal 362.8292096
Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa reveals the ways in which domestic space and domestic relationships take on different meanings in African contexts that extend the boundaries of family obligation, kinship, and dependency. The term domestic violence encompasses kin-based violence, marriage-based violence, gender-based violence, as well as violence between patrons and clients who shared the same domestic space. As a lived experience and as a social and historical unit of analysis, domestic violence in colonial and postcolonial Africa is complex. Using evidence drawn from Subsaharan Africa, the chapters explore the range of domestic violence in Africa’s colonial past and its present, including taxation and the insertion of the household into the broader structure of colonial domination. African histories of domestic violence demand that scholars and activists refine the terms and analyses and pay attention to the historical legacies of contemporary problems. This collection brings into conversation historical, anthropological, legal, and activist perspectives on domestic violence in Africa and fosters a deeper understanding of the problem of domestic violence, the limits of international human rights conventions, and local and regional efforts to address the issue.
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Child Abuse in the Deep South: Geographical Modifiers of Abuse Characteristics
Lee W. Badger
University of Alabama Press, 1988
Library of Congress HV6626.5.C495 1988 | Dewey Decimal 362.7044
The recognition of child abuse as a troubling social and public health problem along with the documentation required by mandatory reporting laws have made possible the epidemiological investigation of risk factors association with child abuse. Child Abuse in the Deep South is a study of physical and sexual child abuse designed to measure the incidence of child abuse and neglect in the state of Alabama, identify the characteristics of confirmed abuse, and test the hypothesis that community size is a key, predictive variable in the surveillance, reporting, and caseworker determination of abuse. Child Abuse in the Deep South is based on a comprehensive review of more than seven thousand randomly selected narrative reports from the Alabama Central Registry.
A landmark finding in this study is that different combinations of cultural factors contribute to the physical and sexual abuse of black and white children in rural, small-town, and urban communities. The rates of abuse discovered and reported in small towns are revealed to be materially higher than those in rural or urbanized locations, especially for young white males, and the authors query whether this indicates higher rates of abuse or higher rates of reporting
Child Abuse in the Deep South provides a quantitative benchmark that investigators and policy-makers will find invaluable on the path to defining at-risk populations, effective interventions, and treatments.
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The Battered Child
Edited by Mary Edna Helfer, Ruth S. Kempe, and Richard D. Krugman
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Library of Congress HV6626.52.B375 1997 | Dewey Decimal 362.760973
First published in 1968, The Battered Child quickly became a landmark work. Our awareness of child abuse today is due in no small part to the remarkable impact of its first and subsequent editions.
The new edition of this classic text continues the legacy. While updating and significantly adding to previous editions, the fifth edition retains the multidisciplinary and comprehensive approach that initially set the work apart. This new edition contains chapters from professionals in such diverse fields as pediatrics, psychiatry, legal studies, and social work that reflect the past decade's extraordinary advances in research and techniques. Twenty of the book's 30 chapters are entirely new, while the remaining material has been extensively revised.
Part I provides a historical overview of child abuse and neglect as well as background material on the cultural, psychiatric, social, economic, and legal contexts of child maltreatment. Part II discusses the processes of assessing cases of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse and neglect from the unique perspectives of all the professionals involved, including teachers, pediatricians, and social workers. Part III describes intervention and treatment, focusing on legal issues, investigative procedures, and therapeutic processes, while Part IV addresses prevention and policy issues.
Previous editions of The Battered Child have earned the labels of "a classic" and a "Bible." With its up-to-date information, unequaled scope, and contributions from experts on every aspect of child abuse, the fifth edition of this cornerstone text is even more essential to the field than its predecessors.
"Comprehensive and up-to-date."—David Cottrell, British Journal of Psychiatry
"A valuable contribution to the field of abuse and neglect"—Prasanna Nair, Journal of the American Medical Association
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Threatened Children: Rhetoric and Concern about Child-Victims
Joel Best
University of Chicago Press, 1990
Library of Congress HV6626.52.B47 1990 | Dewey Decimal 362.760973
Child abuse, incest, child molestation, Halloween sadism, child pornography: although clearly not new problems, they have attracted more attention than ever before. Threatened Children asks why. Joel Best analyzes the rhetorical tools used by child advocates when making claims aimed at raising public anxiety and examines the media's role in transmitting reformers' claims and the public's response to the frightening statistics, compelling examples, and expanding definitions it confronts. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from criminal justice records to news stories, from urban legends to public opinion surveys, Best reveals how the cultural construction of social problems evolves.
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Becoming Anna
Anna J. Michener
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Library of Congress HV6626.52.M54 1998 | Dewey Decimal 362.76092
Becoming Anna is the poignant memoir of the first sixteen years in the life of Anna Michener, a young woman who fought a painful battle against her abusive family. Labeled "crazy girl" for much of her childhood, Anna suffered physical and emotional damage at the hands of the adults who were supposed to love and protect her. Committed to various mental institutions by her family, at sixteen Anna was finally able to escape her chaotic home life and enter a foster home. As an effort toward recovery and self-affirmation as well as a powerful plea on behalf of other abused children, Anna wrote this memoir while the experience was fresh and the emotions were still raw and unhealed. Her story is a powerful tale of survival.
"A teen's raw, in-your-face chronicle of events almost as they were happening. As such, it's unforgettable. . . . Michener's story gives voice to the thousands of children and adolescents trapped in 'the system,' biding their time until their 18th birthdays. A candid and unstinting tell-all."—Kirkus Reviews
"Extraordinary. . . . Michener's expressive writing does justice to a topic that is clearly very disturbing to her personally and communicates a profoundly important message on behalf of all abused and neglected children."—Booklist
"An important book, painful to read, but essential if other children in similar situations are to be saved."—Library Journal
"An innocent child's account of 16 years in hell and of the terrible wrongs inflicted on children who are without rights or caring advocates."—Choice
"[Michener] emerges as a compelling and courageous advocate for children and their welfare—she's a young writer with an extraordinary voice."Feminist Bookstore News
"Quite simply one of the best, most compelling, well-written autobiographies published in years. . . . Remember the name. We have not heard the last of Anna Michener."—Myree Whitfield, Melbourne Herald-Sun, cover story
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Prince of Tricksters: The Incredible True Story of Netley Lucas, Gentleman Crook
Matt Houlbrook
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Library of Congress HV6692.L83H68 2016 | Dewey Decimal 364.163092
Meet Netley Lucas, Prince of Tricksters—royal biographer, best-selling crime writer, and gentleman crook. In the years after the Great War, Lucas becomes infamous for climbing the British social ladder by his expert trickery—his changing names and telling of tales. An impudent young playboy and a confessed confidence trickster, he finances his far-flung hedonism through fraud and false pretenses. After repeated spells in prison, Lucas transforms himself into a confessing “ex-crook,” turning his inside knowledge of the underworld into a lucrative career as freelance journalist and crime expert. But then he’s found out again—exposed and disgraced for faking an exclusive about a murder case. So he reinvents himself, taking a new name and embarking on a prolific, if short-lived, career as a royal biographer and publisher. Chased around the world by detectives and journalists after yet another sensational scandal, the gentleman crook dies as spectacularly as he lived—a washed-up alcoholic, asphyxiated in a fire of his own making.
The lives of Netley Lucas are as flamboyant as they are unlikely. In Prince of Tricksters, Matt Houlbrook picks up the threads of Lucas’s colorful lies and lives. Interweaving crime writing and court records, letters and life-writing, Houlbrook tells Lucas’s fascinating story and, in the process, provides a panoramic view of the 1920s and ’30s. In the restless times after the Great War, the gentlemanly trickster was an exemplary figure, whose tall tales and bogus biographies exposed the everyday difficulties of knowing who and what to trust. Tracing how Lucas both evoked and unsettled the world through which he moved, Houlbrook shows how he prompted a pervasive crisis of confidence that encompassed British society, culture, and politics.
Taking readers on a romp through Britain, North America, and eventually into Africa, Houlbrook confronts readers with the limits of our knowledge of the past and challenges us to think anew about what history is and how it might be made differently.
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The Powell Papers: A Confidence Man Amok Among the Anglo-American Literati
Hershel Parker
Northwestern University Press, 2011
Library of Congress HV6692.P69P37 2011 | Dewey Decimal 364.163092
In 1849—months before the term “confidence man” was coined to identify a New York crook—Thomas Powell (1809–1887), a spherical, monocled, English poetaster, dramatist, journalist, embezzler, and forger, landed in Manhattan. Powell in London had capped a career of grand theft and literary peccadilloes by feigning a suicide attempt and having himself committed to a madhouse, after which he fled England. He had been an intimate of William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, and a crowd of lesser literary folk.
Thoughtfully bearing what he presented as a volume of Tennyson with a few trifling revisions in the hand of the poet, Powell was embraced by the slavishly Anglophile New York literary establishment, including a young Herman Melville. In two pot-boilers—The Living Authors of England (1849) and The Living Authors of America (1850)—Powell denounced the most revered American author, Washington Irving, for plagiarism; provoked Charles Dickens to vengeful trans-Atlantic outrage and then panic; and capped his insolence by identified Irving and Melville as the two worst “enemies of the American mind.” For almost four more decades he sniped at Dickens, put words in Melville’s mouth, and survived even the most conscientious efforts to expose him. Long fascinated by this incorrigible rogue, Hershel Parker in The Powell Papers uses a few familiar documents and a mass of freshly discovered material (including a devastating portrait of Powell in a serialized novel) to unfold a captivating tale of skullduggery through the words of great artists and then-admired journalists alike.
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Skullduggery, Secrets, and Murders: The 1894 Wells Fargo Scam That Backfired
Bill Neal
Texas Tech University Press, 2015
Library of Congress HV6698.O(Oklahoma) | Dewey Decimal 364.1523092
In 1894, George Isaacs, the penniless black sheep of his family, was running with the worst of the outlaws in the Oklahoma Territory. There, a get-rich-quick scheme that seemed foolproof was hatched up. The plan was for George to present money packets falsely purporting to contain $25,000 in cash to the Wells Fargo office in Kansas City. Wells Fargo was to ship the packets via the Santa Fe railroad to George at Canadian, Texas, where George’s cronies would then rob the depot office and steal the phony money packets, thus allowing George Isaacs to sue Wells Fargo for his lost fortune. The plan backfired when the sheriff was on hand when the train arrived. The bandits killed the sheriff but then panicked and raced back to the Territory without grabbing the bogus packets.
Wells Fargo sent an undercover agent to investigate, but the outlaws discovered him, and the agent was assassinated. The two murders led to eight trials, but only one man, George Isaacs, was ever convicted—and even he managed to beat a life sentence. One question lingered: was George truly behind the scam?
The identities of the masterminds behind the foiled plot have remained a mystery for more than a hundred years. With his usual rough-and-tumble tenacity, Bill Neal undertakes the investigation of these two cold-case murders.
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