Murder in America: A History

To understand murder is to understand ourselves since ""we all share the capacity to destroy ourselves and each other,"" writes Lane. While war is the leading subject of traditional history, he finds that historians have only newly turned in the direction of criminal homicide. In the first title in Ohio State's ""History of Crime and Criminal Justice Series,"" Lane (Violent Death in the City) attempts an ambitious overview encompassing medieval England, the 1622 massacre at a Virginia settlement, and familiar and unfamiliar murders up to the 1990s. The story of homicide is set inside the wider history of American violence: riots, lynchings, assassinations, revolutionary political groups, and the turmoil of the '60s. Lane examines degrees of punishment, the effectiveness of the justice system, advances in forensic science and compares legal theory with practice. Unfortunately, the huge scope of this project has resulted in only cursory glimpses at even the most fascinating and celebrated cases. One example is that of University of Chicago student William Heirans which is important both as the first use of ""truth serum"" in a criminal case and also as the inspiration for Charles Einstein's novel The Bloody Spur, Fritz Lang's film While the City Sleeps and Lucy Freeman's memorable psychological portrait of Heirans, Before I Kill Again. The case itself garners a little over a page, and the cultural artifacts receive little or no notice. One footnote: along with his infamous manifesto, Unabomber suspect Theodore Kaczinsky expressed his worried concern that his excessive use of quotations from Lane's earlier writings might be in violation of copyright laws. (May)