HIST 221 Crime in England 1200-1900
This course investigates crime in one country -- England -- over many centuries. How much crime, of what sorts, was there in the past and what did it mean to everyone it touched? Studying crime and its relationship to society, law, and justice across wide ranges of time and space -- sometimes called "historical criminology" -- is a key to unlocking our understanding of communities, governments, economics, and culture, in ways that go far beyond "crime" itself. The course takes three major approaches: legal, concentrating upon what happened in court trials and how and why criminal law developed; sociological, emphasizing quantitative and qualitative approaches to measuring historical crime; and cultural, investigating attitudes toward crime and criminals from medieval outlaw ballads, to mass-circulation "true crime" and sensationalized accounts after the print revolution of the early modern period, to the invention of "celebrity criminals" from the eighteenth century onward. Primary emphasis will be on interpreting original sources (court records, crime pamphlets) and projects that will interrogate multiple online databases that make historical crime data available.
Cross Listed Courses
HIST 221 &
SOC 221