Like so many big cities in the United States, Philadelphia has suffered from a strikingly high murder rate over the past fifty years. Such tragic loss of life, as Eric C. Schneider demonstrates, does not occur randomly throughout the city; rather, murders have been racialized and spatialized, concentrated in the low-income African American populations living within particular neighborhoods. In The Ecology of Homicide, Schneider tracks the history of murder in Philadelphia during a critical period from World War II until the early 1980s, focusing on the years leading up to and immediately following the 1966 Miranda Supreme Court decision and the shift to easier gun access and the resulting spike in violence that followed. Examining the transcripts of nearly two hundred murder trials, The Ecology of Homicide presents the voices of victims and perpetrators of crime, as well as the enforcers of the law-using, to an unprecedented degree, the words of the people who were actually involved. In Schneider's hands, their perspectives produce an intimate record of what was happening on the streets of Philadelphia in the decades from 1940 until 1980, describing how race factored into everyday life, how corrosive crime was to the larger community, how the law intersected with every action of everyone involved, and, most critically, how individuals saw themselves and others. Schneider traces the ways in which low-income African American neighborhoods became ever more dangerous for those who lived there as the combined effects of concentrated poverty, economic disinvestment, and misguided policy accumulated to sustain and deepen what he calls an "ecology of violence," bound in place over time. Covering topics including gender, urban redevelopment, community involvement, children, and gangs, as well as the impact of violence perpetrated by and against police, The Ecology of Homicide is a powerful link between urban history and the contemporary city.

"An analytic overview of the history of social welfare and juvenile justice in Boston..[Schneider] traces cogently the origins, development, and ultimate failure of Protestant and Catholic reformers' efforts to ameliorate working-class poverty and juvenile delinquency."
--"Choice"

"Anyone who wants to understand why America's approach to juvenile justice doesn't work should read In the Web of Class."
--Michael B. Katz, University of Pennsylvania

They called themselves "Vampires," "Dragons," and "Egyptian Kings." They were divided by race, ethnicity, and neighborhood boundaries, but united by common styles, slang, and codes of honor. They fought--and sometimes killed--to protect and expand their territories. In postwar New York, youth gangs were a colorful and controversial part of the urban landscape, made famous by "West Side Story" and infamous by the media. This is the first historical study to explore fully the culture of these gangs. Eric Schneider takes us into a world of switchblades and slums, zoot suits and bebop music to explain why youth gangs emerged, how they evolved, and why young men found membership and the violence it involved so attractive.

Schneider begins by describing how postwar urban renewal, slum clearances, and ethnic migration pitted African-American, Puerto Rican, and Euro-American youths against each other in battles to dominate changing neighborhoods. But he argues that young men ultimately joined gangs less because of ethnicity than because membership and gang violence offered rare opportunities for adolescents alienated from school, work, or the family to win prestige, power, adulation from girls, and a masculine identity. In the course of the book, Schneider paints a rich and detailed portrait of everyday life in gangs, drawing on personal interviews with former members to re-create for us their language, music, clothing, and social mores. We learn what it meant to be a "down bopper" or a "jive stud," to "fish" with a beautiful "deb" to the sounds of the Jesters, and to wear gang sweaters, wildly colored zoot suits, or the "Ivy League look." He outlines the unwritten rules of gang behavior, the paths members followed to adulthood, and the effects of gang intervention programs, while also providing detailed analyses of such notorious gang-related crimes as the murders committed by the "Capeman," Salvador Agron.

Schneider focuses on the years from 1940 to 1975, but takes us up to the present in his conclusion, showing how youth gangs are no longer social organizations but economic units tied to the underground economy. Written with a profound understanding of adolescent culture and the street life of New York, this is a powerful work of history and a compelling story for a general audience.

Smack Heroin and the American City Eric C. Schneider Winner of the Kenneth Jackson Best Book Award for 2008 from the Urban History Association "A sympathetic, engaging, and highly readable antidote to the war-ondrugs-style morality tale. At times the book reads like the award-winning and controversial HBO television series "The Wire." . . . Schneider draws his audience into a colorful narrative complete with larger-than-life characters, heart-tugging tragedies, and triumphant victories that complicate a more simplistic rendering of what constitutes right and wrong, legal and illegal, or mainstream and black market. He effectively humanizes the issue with testimony from users, dealers, traffickers, police, politicians, and educators to show how all parties in this conflict have struggled to bring justice and security to their communities."--"American Historical Review" "Schneider has produced that rarest of academic commodities--a page-turner. The book is exceedingly well written, and its fascinating research and analysis are sure to make it a central text in the field."--"Journal of American History" "Deeply researched and briskly written, with rare photographs and biographical vignettes to keep the narrative moving along, Smack . . . is a triumph of imaginative historical scholarship, though a bittersweet one, written by someone in obvious mourning for the drug-accelerated decline of America's great cities."--"Addiction" "Schneider's absorbing history of heroin's proliferation in America draws a parallel between the evolution and decline of American cities and the rise of heroin use. Rather than treating the city as a "backdrop," Schneider interprets cities as 'the organizers of the world opium market, ' and meticulously traces heroin's ascendancy from early 20th century opium dens to the 1920s jazz milieu and into the suburbs of the late 20th century when heroin finally attracted the attention of the mainstream media."--"Publisher's Weekly" "Since the end of World War II, American cities have been home to illicit drug markets where heroin has been among the most widely-sold products. "Smack" is Eric Schneider's masterful explanation of how heroin entered America's cities, who used it, what happened as a result and how obtuse public policy and naked corruption not only failed to check its distribution but sometimes even contributed to its spread. Schneider exposes the deep misconceptions underlying the nation's futile war on drugs and offers sane and realistic alternatives that, historic experience suggests, could work, if only public authorities have the courage and will."--Michael Katz, "The Price of Citizenship: Redefining the American Welfare State" Eric C. Schneider is Adjunct Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and author of "Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings: Youth Gangs in Postwar New York." Politics and Culture in Modern America 2008 280 pages 6 x 9 14 illus. ISBN 978-0-8122-4116-7 Cloth $49.95s 32.50 ISBN 978-0-8122-2180-0 Paper $24.95s 16.50 ISBN 978-0-8122-0348-6 Ebook $24.95s 16.50 World Rights American History Short copy: Why do the vast majority of heroin users live in cities? In his provocative history of heroin in the United States, Eric Schneider explains what is distinctively urban about this undisputed king of underworld drugs.

In recent years Turkey's commercial connections with the rest of the world have grown dramatically. The relative inaccessibility of Turkish business law to lawyers, business persons, and students from other countries prompted the first edition of this book in 2001. This fully updated new edition reflects important changes - notably in the areas of foreign direct investment and conflict of laws rules - and adds additional chapters on banking law, commercial arbitration law, and intellectual property law.