With the United States on the way to becoming an almost completely urban nation, the financing of cities has become an issue of great urgency; put simply, American cities do not have enough money. This book examines the role of local fiscal policies and fiscal politics in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.

America's cities: celebrated by poets, courted by politicians, castigated by social reformers. In their numbers and complexity they challenge comprehension. Why is urban America the way it is? Eric Monkkonen offers a fresh approach to the myths and the history of US urban development, giving us an unexpected and welcome sense of our urban origins. His historically anchored vision of our cities places topics of finance, housing, social mobility, transportation, crime, planning, and growth into a perspective which explains the present in terms of the past and ofers a point from which to plan for the future. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1988 with a paperback in 1990.

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in the social history of crime an-long a variety of disciplines. This book examines the rapid spread of uniformed police forces throughout late nineteenth-century urban America. It suggests that, initially, the new kind of police in industrial cities served primarily as agents of class control, dispensing and administering welfare services as an unintentioned consequence of their uniformed presence on the streets. This narrowed role hampered their ability to control crime, and, as modern social services developed and the police came increasingly to concentrate on crime control, they acquired a functional speciality at which they had never been particularly successful.

"Murder in New York City" dramatically expands what we know about urban homicide, and challenges some of the things we think we know. Eric Monkkonen's unprecedented investigation covers two centuries of murder in America's biggest city, combining newly assembled statistical evidence with many other documentary sources to tease out the story behind the figures.
As we generally believe, the last part of the twentieth century was unusually violent, but there have been other high-violence eras as well: the late 1920s and the mid-nineteenth century, the latter because the absence of high-quality weapons and ammunition makes that era's stabbings and beatings seem almost more vicious. Monkkonen's long view allows us to look back to a time when guns were rarer, when poverty was more widespread, and when racial discrimination was more intense, and to ask what difference these things made. With many vivid case studies for illustration, he examines the crucial factors in killing through the years: the weapons of choice, the sex and age of offenders and victims, the circumstances and settings in which homicide tends to occur, and the race and ethnicity of murderers and their victims.
In a final chapter, Monkkonen looks to the international context and shows that New York--and, by extension, the United States--has had consistently higher violence levels than London and Liverpool. No single factor, he says, shapes this excessive violence, but exploring the variables of age, ethnicity, weapons, and demography over the long term can lead to hope of changing old patterns.

Along with most of the rest         of Western culture, has crime itself become more "civilized"?         This book exposes as myths the beliefs that society has become more violent         than it has been in the past and that violence is more likely to occur         in cities than in rural areas.       The product of years of study         by scholars from North America and Europe, The Civilization of Crime         shows that, however violent some large cities may be now, both rural and         urban communities in Sweden, Holland, England, and other countries were         far more violent during the late Middle Ages than any cities are today.       Contributors show that the         dramatic change is due, in part, to the fact that violence was often tolerated         or even accepted as a form of dispute settlement in village-dominated         premodern society. Interpersonal violence declined in the seventeenth         and eighteenth centuries, as dispute resolution was taken over by courts         and other state institutions and the church became increasingly intolerant         of it.       The book also challenges a         number of other historical-sociological theories, among them that contemporary         organized crime is new, and addresses continuing debate about the meaning         and usefulness of crime statistics.       CONTRIBUTORS: Esther Cohen,         Herman Diederiks, Florike Egmond, Eric A. Johnson, Michele Mancino, Eric         H. Monkkonen, Eva Österberg, James A. Sharpe, Pieter Spierenburg,         Jan Sundin, Barbara Weinberger  

Vigorous historical exploration has increased across the social sciences in the past two decades. Originally published as a series of articles in the journal Social Science History, the essays in this volume provide a guide to historical social science by surveying the use of historical data and methodologies in anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, and geography.
Each essay in Engaging the Past pays close attention to the unique problems and methods associated with its particular social scientific discipline. By exploring questions raised by both contemporary and more established works within each field, the authors show that some of the best and most innovative research in each of the social sciences includes a strong historical component. Thus, as Eric H. Monkkonen's introduction shows, these essays taken together make it clear that historical research provides a significant key to many of the major issues in the social sciences.
Intended for the growing community of both social scientists and historians interested in reading or researching historically informed social science, Engaging the Past suggests future directions that might be taken by this work. Above all, by providing a set of user's guides written by respected social scientists, it encourages future boundary crossings between history and each of the social sciences.Contributors. Andrew Abbott, Richard Dennis, Susan Kellog, Eric H. Monkkonen, David Brian Robertson, Hugh Rockoff