Crime & Policing

While Crack is, as books go, on the slim side, it covers a lot of ground. While I hope the chapters on the history of cocaine, the lure of crack,...

Consider the 1982 “bite mark case” in Newport News, Virginia, that resulted in a murder conviction and death sentence for Keith Allen Harward, who was incarcerated for 33 years before...

Unsilencing is the first comprehensive study of the Bulgarian gulag— a network of forced-labor camps and prisons that operated throughout the communist era from 1945 to 1989. Referred to as “Little Siberia,” these camps interned thousands without trial, subjected them to inhumane conditions, and silenced them for decades. Drawing on two decades of archival research, oral history interviews...

Pistols! Treason! Murder! describes the short, disturbing and unprecedented career of a Venetian spy, Gerolamo Vano, who was executed for perjury in 1622. In the years immediately preceding his death, Vano...

The relationship between violence and feelings about government has often tracked separately by race in this country. In the last five decades, the black homicide rate peaked between 1971 and...

My interest in these historical events is a product of our times. Prior to 2004 it is unlikely that I would have written a book about torture in the United...

The study of assassination is akin to running a razor blade down the history of international politics: the cut is narrow but long and deep. Assassination reveals statesmen and their...

Most research on children’s development follows a group of people born around the same time—a single birth cohort. But as children grow up, the world around them is also changing. Individual development and social change are intertwined; you cannot really understand one without the other.

My book is a stark but comprehensive look at what really happened following the discovery of two seemingly unrelated cases of murder near Phoenix, Arizona, in 1991. The first case involved...

Throughout my career, my specialty has been criminal law, criminal procedure, and criminology. My interest in labor racketeering began in the mid 1980s when I served as a consultant for...

End of its Rope explores why the death penalty in America unexpectedly faded away. Twenty years ago, death sentencing was at its modern height. Across the Southern “death belt,” death sentences...

I would hope readers pay close attention to Chapter 5, An Epidemics of Mob Justice, pp. 167-191, especially the graphic cases, 170–177. Also, I would like readers to pay attention...

Of the four host countries I studied—the US, Britain, Switzerland, and Australia—the last one seems like the odd one out. Aside from the fact that I am from there, Australia...

I discovered many interesting issues in my research into the illegal wildlife trade and will just mention three here. The German and British colonial governments in east Africa established the first game parks and game laws on the continent.

Violette Nozière tells the story of a high-profile criminal case that took place in Paris in 1933-34. An eighteen-year-old girl, the only child of a striving lower-middle-class couple, carefully devised and...

I did not write this book to “debunk” the lie detector. Eminent psychologists have been trying to do that for eighty years, ever since interrogators first re-purposed some basic physiological...

The Burke and Hare anatomy murders were a sensation in their own day, the first serial killings to be reported in the popular press. The story traveled wherever newspapers were...

No matter where Americans live, their risk of being murdered is higher than it is in any other first-world democracy. From 1965 to 1992, the homicide rate in the United States...

I was drawn to a new topic—I am an historian of the press of eighteenth-century and revolutionary France. But I can trace my interest in contemporary media to my belief that...

There is more than one business model of human trafficking and there are enormous variations in human trafficking in different regions of the world. This book examines all forms of...

Andean Cocaine is cocaine’s first full-length biography. The book is, I hope, a more “serious” than usual history of the infamous drug, covering more than a century from cocaine’s birth...

The history of China’s interactions with Western cultures is fraught with misunderstandings, especially on the part of the West. Based on information supplied by pioneering Jesuit missionaries in China at...

While Crack is, as books go, on the slim side, it covers a lot of ground. While I hope the chapters on the history of cocaine, the lure of crack,...

Consider the 1982 “bite mark case” in Newport News, Virginia, that resulted in a murder conviction and death sentence for Keith Allen Harward, who was incarcerated for 33 years before...

Unsilencing is the first comprehensive study of the Bulgarian gulag— a network of forced-labor camps and prisons that operated throughout the communist era from 1945 to 1989. Referred to as “Little Siberia,” these camps interned thousands without trial, subjected them to inhumane conditions, and silenced them for decades. Drawing on two decades of archival research, oral history interviews...

Pistols! Treason! Murder! describes the short, disturbing and unprecedented career of a Venetian spy, Gerolamo Vano, who was executed for perjury in 1622. In the years immediately preceding his death, Vano...

The relationship between violence and feelings about government has often tracked separately by race in this country. In the last five decades, the black homicide rate peaked between 1971 and...

My interest in these historical events is a product of our times. Prior to 2004 it is unlikely that I would have written a book about torture in the United...

The study of assassination is akin to running a razor blade down the history of international politics: the cut is narrow but long and deep. Assassination reveals statesmen and their...

Most research on children’s development follows a group of people born around the same time—a single birth cohort. But as children grow up, the world around them is also changing. Individual development and social change are intertwined; you cannot really understand one without the other.

My book is a stark but comprehensive look at what really happened following the discovery of two seemingly unrelated cases of murder near Phoenix, Arizona, in 1991. The first case involved...

Throughout my career, my specialty has been criminal law, criminal procedure, and criminology. My interest in labor racketeering began in the mid 1980s when I served as a consultant for...

End of its Rope explores why the death penalty in America unexpectedly faded away. Twenty years ago, death sentencing was at its modern height. Across the Southern “death belt,” death sentences...

I would hope readers pay close attention to Chapter 5, An Epidemics of Mob Justice, pp. 167-191, especially the graphic cases, 170–177. Also, I would like readers to pay attention...

Of the four host countries I studied—the US, Britain, Switzerland, and Australia—the last one seems like the odd one out. Aside from the fact that I am from there, Australia...

I discovered many interesting issues in my research into the illegal wildlife trade and will just mention three here. The German and British colonial governments in east Africa established the first game parks and game laws on the continent.

Violette Nozière tells the story of a high-profile criminal case that took place in Paris in 1933-34. An eighteen-year-old girl, the only child of a striving lower-middle-class couple, carefully devised and...

I did not write this book to “debunk” the lie detector. Eminent psychologists have been trying to do that for eighty years, ever since interrogators first re-purposed some basic physiological...

The Burke and Hare anatomy murders were a sensation in their own day, the first serial killings to be reported in the popular press. The story traveled wherever newspapers were...

No matter where Americans live, their risk of being murdered is higher than it is in any other first-world democracy. From 1965 to 1992, the homicide rate in the United States...

I was drawn to a new topic—I am an historian of the press of eighteenth-century and revolutionary France. But I can trace my interest in contemporary media to my belief that...

There is more than one business model of human trafficking and there are enormous variations in human trafficking in different regions of the world. This book examines all forms of...

Andean Cocaine is cocaine’s first full-length biography. The book is, I hope, a more “serious” than usual history of the infamous drug, covering more than a century from cocaine’s birth...

The history of China’s interactions with Western cultures is fraught with misunderstandings, especially on the part of the West. Based on information supplied by pioneering Jesuit missionaries in China at...