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Ordinary Lives, Death, and Social Class focuses on the evolution of the Dublin City Coroner's Court and on Dr Louis A. Bryne's first two years in office. Wrapping itself around the 1901 census, the study uses gender, power, and blame as analytical frameworks to examine what inquests can tell us about the impact of urban living from lifecycle and class perspectives. Coroners' inquests are a combination of eyewitness testimony, expert medico-legal language, detailed minutiae of people, places, and occupational identities pinned to a moment in time. Thus they have a simultaneous capacity to reveal histories from both above and below. Rich in geographical, socio-economic, cultural, class, and medical detail, these records collated in a liminal setting about the hour of death bear incredible witness to what has often been termed 'ordinary lives'. The subjects of Dr Byrne's court were among the poorest in Ireland and, apart from common medical causes problems linked to lower socio-economic groups, this volume covers preventable cases of workplace accidents, neglect, domestic abuse, and homicide.
How and when did forensic science originate in the UK? This question demands our attention because our understanding of present-day forensic science is vastly enriched through gaining an appreciation of what went before. A History of Forensic Science is the first book to consider the wide spectrum of influences which went into creating the discipline in Britain in the first part of the twentieth century. This book offers a history of the development of forensic sciences, centred on the UK, but with consideration of continental and colonial influences, from around 1880 to approximately 1940. This period was central to the formation of a separate discipline of forensic science with a distinct ...
Was the First World War really 'For King and Country'? This is the first full history of the monarchy's role.
"The essays in this book set out to explore the ways in which Victorians used newspapers to identify the causes of bad behavior and its impacts, and the ways in which they tried to "distance" criminals and those guilty of "bad" behavior from the ordinary members of society, including identification of them as different according to race of sexual orientation. It also explores how threats from within "normal" society were depicted and the panic that issues like "baby-farming" caused." "Victorian alarm was about crimes and bad behavior which they saw as new or unique to their period - but which were not new then and which, in slightly different dress, are still causing panic today. What is striking about the essays in this collection are the ways in which they echo contemporary concerns about crime and bad behavior, including panics about "new" types of crime. This has implications for modern understandings of how society needs to understand crime, demonstrating that while there are changes over time, there are also important continuities."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
The recent global financial crisis has been characterised as a turning point in the way we respond to financial crime. Focusing on this change and ‘crime in the commercial sphere’, this text considers the legal and economic dimensions of financial crime and its significance in societal consciousness in twenty-first century Britain. Considering how strongly criminal enforcement specifically features in identifying the post-crisis years as a ‘turning point’, it argues that nineteenth-century encounters with financial crime were transformative for contemporary British societal perceptions of ‘crime’ and its perpetrators, and have lasting resonance for legal responses and societal re...
This book presents a unique sociological examination of British raciology, focusing on women's literary works of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and drawing from a range of academic disciplines, particularly literature, history and cultural studies. Wright traces the emergence of British modernity through the writings of a select group of women writers (including Jane Austen, Hannah More, Fanny Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Maria Edgeworth) of diverse political and philosophical affiliations, and fills a gap in scholarship on feminist accounts of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women's writing.
Drawing on work from inside some of America’s largest and toughest prisons, this book documents an alternative model of "restorative corrections" utilizing the lived experience of successful inmates, fast disrupting traditional models of correctional programming. While research documents a strong desire among those serving time in prison to redeem themselves, inmates often confront a profound lack of opportunity for achieving redemption. In a system that has become obsessively and dysfunctionally punitive, often fewer than 10% of prisoners receive any programming. Incarcerated citizens emerge from prisons in the United States to reoffend at profoundly high rates, with the majority of relea...
Bringing together an international range of academics, Gender, Sexualities and Law provides a comprehensive interrogation of the range of contemporary issues – both topical and controversial – raised by the gendered character of law, legal discourse and institutions. The gendering of law, persons and the legal profession, along with the gender bias of legal outcomes, has been a fractious, but fertile, focus of reflection. It has, moreover, been an important site of political struggle. This collection of essays offers an unrivalled examination of its various contemporary dimensions, focusing on: issues of theory and representation; violence, both national and international; reproduction and parenting; and partnership, sexuality, marriage and the family. Gender, Sexualities and Law will be invaluable for all those engaged in research and study of the law (and related fields) as a form of gendered power.
This book re-imagines nineteenth-century detective fiction as a literary genre that was connected to, and nurtured by, contemporary periodical journalism. Whilst ‘detective fiction’ is almost universally-accepted to have originated in the nineteenth century, a variety of widely-accepted scholarly narratives of the genre’s evolution neglect to connect it with the development of a free press. The volume traces how police officers, detectives, criminals, and the criminal justice system were discussed in the pages of a variety of magazines and journals, and argues that this affected how the wider nineteenth-century society perceived organised law enforcement and detection. This, in turn, helped to shape detective fiction into the genre that we recognise today. The book also explores how periodicals and newspapers contained forgotten, non-canonical examples of ‘detective fiction’, and that these texts can help complicate the narrative of the genre’s evolution across the mid- to late nineteenth century.
This book explores the form, function and meaning of crime and execution broadsides printed in nineteenth-century Britain. By presenting a detailed discourse analysis of 650 broadsides printed across Britain between the years 1800-1850, this book provides a unique and alternative interpretation as to their narratives of crime. This criminological interpretation is based upon the social theories of Emile Durkheim, who recognised the higher utility of crime and punishment as being one of social integration and the preservation of moral boundaries. The central aim of this book is to show that broadsides relating to crime and punishment served as a form of moral communication for the masses and that they are examples of how the working class once attempted to bolster a sense of stability and community, during the transitional years of the early nineteenth century, by effectively representing both a consolidation and celebration of their core values and beliefs.