| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Eric H. Monkkonen. Murder in New York City. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2001. Pp. xii, 238. $29.95.

In this important new work, Eric H. Monkkonen continues his exploration of the history of violent crime and urban life. The book is a longitudinal study of murder in this largest of U.S. cities from the early nineteenth century to the present, and, like his earlier work, it is based on extensive quantitative analysis. Long recognized as one of the deans of urban and crime history, Monkkonen has undertaken a significant task: to document the history of murder in New York City through a comprehensive statistical analysis, and to integrate that numerical data with a variety of printed accounts and sources, including newspaper stories and police and court records. He accompanies the primary narrative about crime in New York City with a fine essay comparing the American experience with murder to the European, especially the English. This is a study that validates several of the assertions of recent work on the history of crime in Western society, namely that: violent crime has decreased as we have moved into modern times; violent crime is not necessarily characteristic of urban (as opposed to rural) life; and men have been far more likely to settle their disputes through acts of personal violence than women. Indeed, with the exception of an unusually violent period in the late twentieth century, the number of violent crimes has been low during several critical decades in New York and U.S. history: the turbulent 1830s and 1890s, and the 1950s. . . .

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