Crime

A Few Bad Apples

Brutality, corruption and abuses of power in the Metropolitan Police at the turn of the 20th century led to an inquiry – but no reform.

Policing the Windrush Generation

Police brutality and stop-and-search are yet another legacy of Empire.

Convicts wearing ‘mask hats’ exercising at Pentonville Prison. Engraving by Swain after Bennett, c.1870.

Behind Victorian Bars

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

A Forensic Take On Deviance

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

Prisoners at work at the Noumea Penal Colony, New Caledonia, engraved by Gillot, c.1900.

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.

The First Execution by Electric Chair

William Kemmler was killed on August 6th, 1890.

The brides and their killer: the trial reported, July 2nd, 1915.

Serial killer Smith convicted

A notorious mass murderer was sentenced to death on July 1st 1915.

The Acid Bath Murderer: objects relating to the murder of Mrs Olive Durand-Deacon by John Haigh, 1949 © Museum of London

Mythologising Criminal History

How do you avoid glorifying the acts of criminals?

Evelyn Wrentan plays a highway-woman in the 1935 film, Hands Up.

On Her Own Terms: the Highway-woman

This is an extract from Anna Field’s ‘Masculinity and Myth’, which won the 2014 History Today undergraduate dissertation prize, awarded in conjunction with the Royal Historical Society.