Crime

At its founding, Pennsylvania had one of the most tolerant criminal law systems in the world, but by the middle of the 18th century its capital Philadelphia was a ‘hell of the officials and preachers’.

The actions of lynch mobs during the late 19th century damaged the United States’ relationship with Britain and threatened its self-appointed role as the world’s moral guardian.

The resort to law was an integral and regular part of everyday life in medieval Britain – and not just for men. Town court records offer glimpses into the lives of hundreds of ordinary women, through the lawsuits they were involved in. 

Contradictions in Roman law left incurable headaches for its judges.

The problem with community policing.

Turning chaotic havens of ‘sloth and debauchery’ into systemised institutions of ‘pain and terror’, Victorian ‘model’ prisons were anything but. 

Microhistories, examining a range of notorious and mundane crimes, can help recover marginalised figures and forge links to wider cultural histories.

When the European powers began exporting convicts to other continents, they did so to create a deterrent and to establish new settlements across the world. Clare Anderson traces the history of punitive passages.