This site contains projects completed as part of HIST 389 / HIST 395 Crime in Modern America, an undergraduate course taught at George Mason University by Professor Stephen Robertson.

Each project examines the reporting of a crime in a newspaper published between 1880 and 1920 available in the Chronicling America digitized newspaper collection of the Library of Congress. Students gathered a set of stories published twenty years apart, or as close to that as the sources allowed, in either 1880 and 1900 or 1900 and 1920. The projects map the location of the crimes being reported, analyzed the nature of the crime, who was involved and the language in which the crime was reported, and compared their findings with historical studies of that crime.

• The Map page displays the locations of the newspapers that are the subject of projects.
• The Timeline displays the time periods covered by projects
• The Crimes page groups the projects by the crime on which they focus, displayed on a map of the locations where the newspapers were published