Re: No Country for Old Men

Howard Duck wrote:

I don't know who you think you're arguing with.

Someone with a profound ignorance of some of the less notable aspects of
human domestic history.

Just do a Google search under increases in crime, murder, rape, suicide,
drug abuse, unwed mothers, divorce, etc.


Like this??:

Historical Study of Homicide and Cities Surprises the Experts

By FOX BUTTERFIELD,
Published: October 23, 1994

The numbers are in and even experts who study violence are surprised:
Cities have not always been meccas for murder, and this is not the first
heyday for homicides.

Historians now say that homicide rates were extraordinarily high in Europe
during the Middle Ages -- and high in the United States during the early
19th century -- then declined steadily until the 1960's. And for centuries,
it was villages that were often the scenes of violence.

These findings, published in recent papers and presented earlier this month
at the annual conference of the Social Science History Association here,
contradict a basic tenet of criminology, that violence is endemic to
densely packed urban and industrial centers where traditional social ties
and values necessarily break down. The new research should "undermine the
basic claim that the city, with its anonymity and crowding, is in and of
itself the factor in causing violence," said Joan McCord, a professor of
criminal justice at Temple University and a past president of the American
Society of Criminology.

Eric H. Monkkonen, a professor of American urban history at the University
of California at Las Angeles, said: "What we are finding is that violence
is not an immutable human problem. There really has been a civilizing
process" in which, scholars say, an increase in state power and courtly
manners beginning in the 16th and 17th centuries helped curb impulsive,
violent behavior.

When the first research on homicide rates was reported more than a decade
ago by historians studying England, scholars doubted its accuracy, since it
relied on old court records and coroners' data. In recent years, critics
have focused on the population base used to calculate homicide rates:
precisely how many people were living in England in the 1400's, for
example? But with researchers reporting similar results from many countries
over centuries, including the United States, Australia, England, France,
Italy and the Netherlands, there is mounting agreement, said Lawrence
Stone, professor emeritus of history at Princeton, that "all these figures
just can't be false."

New data presented at the conference by a Dutch scholar, Pieter Spierenburg,
showed that the homicide rate in Amsterdam, for example, dropped from 47
per 100,000 people in the mid-15th century to 1 to 1.5 per 100,000 in the
early 19th century.

***************************************************************************
*Professor Stone has estimated that the homicide rate in medieval England *
*was on average 10 times that of 20th century England. A study of the *
*university town of Oxford in the 1340's showed an extraordinarily high *
*annual rate of about 110 per 100,000 people. Studies of London in the *
*first half of the 14th century determined a homicide rate of 36 to 52 per*
*100,000 people per year. *
***************************************************************************


By contrast, the 1993 homicide rate in New York City was 25.9 per 100,000.
The 1992 national homicide rate for the United States was 9.3 per 100,000.

After examining coroners' inquests, Barbara A. Hannawalt, a professor of
medieval English history at the University of Minnesota, concluded that
most slayings in medieval England started as quarrels among farmers in the
field. "They were grubbing for existence," she said. Insults to honor were
taken seriously, and violence was the accepted method of settling disputes,
since the king's courts were slow, expensive and corrupt.

The knife and the quarterstaff, the heavy wooden stick commonly carried for
herding animals and walking on the muddy roads, were the weapons of choice.
"Everyone carried a knife, even women," she said, since "if you sat down
somewhere to eat, you were expected to bring your own." Given the lack of
sanitation at the time, even simple knife wounds could prove deadly.

Why the homicide rate in Europe began to drop in the 16th and 17th centuries
is a matter of debate. The most widely accepted explanation stems from the
work of Norbert Elias, a sociologist who in the late 1930's introduced the
idea of a "civilizing process," in which the nobility was transformed from
knights into courtiers, bringing in a new set of manners, and the modern
state spread its power over the populace.

Official justice administered by courts replaced private vengeance conducted
by feuds, fights and duels. Challenging conventional academic wisdom, Mr.
Elias suggested, too, that the power of the state extended to cities first,
so urban homicide rates would be comparatively low.

Recent research indicates that he was right. In Philadelphia, for example,
the annual average rate of indictments for homicide fell from 4 per 100,000
in the 1850's to 2.2 in the early 1890's, according to research by Roger
Lane, a history professor at Haverford College. The drop occurred as the
city became industrialized and despite the greater availability of firearms
during the period.

As people began to go to work in factories, their behavior was constrained
by the foreman and the whistle, Professor Lane has written. Behavior was
also improved by the spread of public schools, which acted as "agents of
social control," and institutions like the Y.M.C.A. and Sunday schools,
which taught morality. Similar developments helped lower New York's
homicide rate in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Professor
Monkkonen said.

Then came the 1960's. Around the world, homicide rates did an about-face.
When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, for example, the
national homicide rate in the United States was 4.6 per 100,000 people. By
1970, it had doubled, and by 1980 had reached 10.1 per 100,000.

Researchers point to several possible explanations. Post-World War II baby
boomers came of age in the 1960's, increasing the number of young men, the
most violence-prone group, in the population. The 60's also marked a shift
among many social, cultural and economic forces that worked against
violence in previous eras. America began moving into a post-industrial
economy, governmental authority came into question with the Vietnam war,
and the traditional family was threatened by things like divorce.

"The good news is violence can go down," Professor Monkkonen. "The bad news
is, we need to learn how to make it happen."

[ http://snipurl.com/21tzf ]

We're talking mainly about the 20th and 21st century, and primarily in
America


You may wish to so limit the discussion, I take a far broader view. Crime
rates fluctuate all the time - particularly in our exceedingly and
unprecedentedly well documented modern times.

Remember, with requirments of live eyewitnesses to a murder and a singular
lack of anything like modern crime scene investigations one heck of a lot
of crimes in the past were either never reported or if reported (a human
body can be singularly difficult to hide, particularly if time matters)
never solved, and even if reported record keeping was often indifferent at
best and certainly unstandardized.

Just because you try to live in an carefully insulated little room it does
not follow that the rest of us choose to wallow in ignorance.

elf



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