Scholarly interest in the history of crime has grown dramatically in recent years and, because scholars associated with this work have relied on a broad social definition of crime which includes acts that are against the law as well as acts of social banditry and political rebellion, crime history has become a major aspect not only of social history, but also of cultural as well as legal studies. This collection explores how the history of crime provides a way to study time, place and culture. Adopting an international and interdisciplinary perspective to investigate the historical discourses of crime in Europe and the United States from the sixteenth to the late twentieth century, these original works provide new approaches to understanding the meaning of crime in modern western culture and underscore the new importance given to crime and criminal events in historical studies. Written by both well-known historians and younger scholars from across the globe, the essays reveal that there are important continuities in the history of crime and its representations in modern culture, despite particularities of time and place.

Scholarly interest in the history of crime has grown dramatically in recent years and, because scholars associated with this work have relied on a broad social definition of crime which includes acts that are against the law as well as acts of social banditry and political rebellion, crime history has become a major aspect not only of social history, but also of cultural as well as legal studies. This collection explores how the history of crime provides a way to study time, place and culture. Adopting an international and interdisciplinary perspective to investigate the historical discourses of crime in Europe and the United States from the sixteenth to the late twentieth century, these original works provide new approaches to understanding the meaning of crime in modern western culture and underscore the new importance given to crime and criminal events in historical studies. Written by both well-known historians and younger scholars from across the globe, the essays reveal that there are important continuities in the history of crime and its representations in modern culture, despite particularities of time and place.

In the summer of 1841, Mary Rogers, a young woman known popularly as "The Beautiful Cigar Girl," disappeared without a trace from her New York City boarding house. Three days later, her body, badly bruised and waterlogged, was found floating in the shallow waters of the Hudson River just a few feet from the Jersey shore. A long celebrated unsolved mystery, this case became the subject of endless commentary and speculation in the new penny press and the popular novel, and received its most famous exposition in Edgar Allan Poe's pioneering detective story "The Mystery of Marie Roget."

In The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers, historian Amy Gilman Srebnick brilliantly recaptures the story of Mary Rogers, showing how Rogers represented an emerging class of urban women and how her death became a touchstone for mid-nineteenth century concerns over sexual license, the changing roles of women, law and order, and abortion. Rogers' death, first thought due to a murderous gang of rapists and later tacitly understood to be the result of an ill-performed abortion, quickly became a source of popular entertainment, a topic of political debate, and an inspiration to public policy, including the 1845 New York State law criminalizing abortion. The incident and the city's response to it provides a fascinating window into the urban culture and consciousness of the mid-1800s.