American homicide

by Randolph Roth

Randolph Roth charts changes in the character and incidence of homicide in the U.S. from colonial times to the present. He argues that the United States is distinctive in its level of violence among unrelated adults--friends, acquaintances, and strangers. America was extraordinarily homicidal in the mid-seventeenth century, but it became relatively non-homicidal by the mid-eighteenth century. Then the homicide rate skyrocketed from the late 1840s through the mid-1870s, while rates in most other Western nations held steady or fell. That surge--and all subsequent increases in the homicide rate--correlated closely with four distinct phenomena: political instability; a loss of government legitimacy; a loss of fellow-feeling among members of society caused by racial, religious, or political antagonism; and a loss of faith in the social hierarchy. Those four factors, Roth argues, best explain why homicide rates have gone up and down over the past four centuries, and why the United States is