Volume 25, Number 21 & 22 · January 25, 1979
American Terror
By Graham Hughes
Criminal Violence, Criminal Justice
by Charles E. Silberman
Random House, 540 pp., $15.00
Violent crime is always with us, but today more obtrusively and frighteningly than in earlier remembered times. Or at least so it seems. But where can we look to verify this? Reconstructing the crime and fear of the past is a delicate task. Until the late nineteenth century we have to rely on indirect or impressionistic sources, fragmentary public records, literature and letters. They often paint a lurid picture. Henry Fielding, the London Bow Street magistrate, wrote in 1751:
Review, 3252 words
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