Schedule

The class will meet Mondays & Wednesdays 12:00-1:15PM in Music/Theater Building 1007.

PowerPoint Slides for each class are available on the course Blackboard site

Week 1

• 8/26 – WHAT IS THE HISTORY OF CRIME? WHAT IS DIGITAL HISTORY?

• 8/28 – UNDERSTANDING TURN-OF-THE-20^th-CENTURY NEWSPAPERS & CRIME REPORTING (1)
  • Reading:
    • Anne Rubenstein, “Newspapers,” World History Sources

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Week 2

• 9/2 – LABOR DAY – NO CLASS
  

• 9/4 – UNDERSTANDING TURN-OF-THE-20^th-CENTURY NEWSPAPERS & CRIME REPORTING (2)
  • Reading:
    • Michael Trotti, The Body in the Reservoir: Murder and Sensationalism in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina press, 2008), chap. 3: “The Disenchantment of Sensational Murder,” 80-109.
    • Resource: Comparing Newspapers

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Week 3:

• 9/9 – WORKING WITH DIGITAL NEWSPAPERS: Chronicling America, digitization, OCR, & search
  • Chronicling America Data Visualizations
  • Projects using Chronicling America:
    • Mapping Texts
    • Viral Texts: Mapping Networks of Reprinting in 19th-Century Newspapers and Magazines
    • America’s Public Bible: Biblical Quotations in U.S. Newspapers
    • American Lynching: Uncovering a Cultural Narrative
  • Chronicling Crime (the course project site)
  • Choose the newspaper that will be the focus of your work in this course. When you choose a paper, use this list and make sure there are issues of the paper in the database for either the years 1880-1900 or 1900-1920.
    • Examples of Newspapers

• 9/11 – MURDER
  • Resources for assignment #4:
    • Randolph Roth, American Homicide (Harvard University Press, 2009)
    • Eric Monkkonen, Murder in New York City (University of California Press, 2001).
    • Jeffrey Adler, First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt : Homicide in Chicago, 1875-1920 (Harvard University Press, 2009)

 

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Week 4:

• 9/16 – NO CLASS

• 9/18 – MURDER – in Chronicling America newspapers
  • Search term: Murder

 

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Week 5:

• 9/23 – ASSAULT
  • Resources for assignment #4:
    • Joshua Stein, “Privatizing Violence: A Transformation in the Jurisprudence of Assault,” Law and History Review 30, 2 (2012)
    • Pamela Haag, “The ill-use of a wife: Patterns of working-class violence in domestic and public New York City, 1860-1880,” Journal of Social History 25, 3 (1992): 447-77.
    • Donna Graves, “‘We’ll Fight It Out Fair Right Now’: Homicide, Felony Assault, and Gender in Kansas City, Kansas, 1890-1920,” Kansas History, 26, 1 (2003)

• 9/25 – ASSAULT– in Chronicling America newspapers
  • Search: Assault

 

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Week 6:

• 9/30 – MORALS OFFENSES: GAMBLING
  • Resources for assignment#4:
    • Mark H. Haller, “The Changing Structure of American Gambling in the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Social Issues 35 (1979): 87–114.
    • Shane White, “City of Numbers: Rethinking Harlem’s Place in Black Business History,” in Race Capital? Harlem as Setting and Symbol ed Andrew Fearnley and Daniel Matlin (Columbia University Press, 2019)

• 10/2 – MORALS OFFENSES: GAMBLING – in Chronicling America newspapers
  • Search: gambling; lottery; policy slips; slot machine

 

 

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Week 7:

• 10/7 – MORALS OFFENSES: LIQUOR & PROHIBITION
  • Resource for assignment#4
    • Lisa McGirr, The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State, chap. 3: “Selective Enforcement,” 67-102 (available from Dr Robertson)

• 10/9– MORALS OFFENSES: LIQUOR & PROHIBITION – in Chronicling America newspapers
  • Search:  liquor; drunkenness; smuggling; license; bootlegger; padlocking; conspiracy; raid

 

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 Week 8:

• 10/14 – GMU FALL BREAK – NO CLASS

• 10/16 – SEX OFFENSES: SODOMY– in Chronicling America newspapers
  • Resource for assignment #4:
    • Stephen Robertson, “Shifting the Scene of the Crime: Sodomy and the American History of Sexual Violence,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 19, 2 (May 2010): 223-242
  • Search: sodomy; crime against nature; unnatural act; buggery

 

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Week 9:

• 10/21– SEX OFFENSES: RAPE
  • Resource for assignment#4:
    • Estelle Freedman, “”Crimes which startle and horrify”: Gender, Age, and the Racialization of Sexual Violence in White American Newspapers, 1870-1900,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 20, 3 (2011): 465-497

• 10/23– SEX OFFENSES: RAPE – in Chronicling America newspapers
  • Search: criminal assault; rape

 

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Week 10:

• 10/28 – SEX OFFENSES: ABORTION
  • Resources for assignment #4 (links on website):
    • Michael Helquist, “‘Criminal Operations’: The First Fifty Years of Abortion Trials in Portland, Oregon,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 116, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 5–39.
    • Leslie Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine and the Law in the United States, 1867-1973 (University of California Press, 1997), chap. 4: “Investigations and Interrogations,” 113-131.

• 10/30 – SEX OFFENSES: ABORTION – in Chronicling America newspapers
  • Search: criminal operation; illegal operation; abortion

 

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Week 11:

• 11/4 – PROPERTY CRIME: THEFT
  • Resource for assignment#4
    • Katherine Unterman, “Boodle over the Border: Embezzlement and the Crisis of International Mobility, 1880–1890,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 11, 2 (2012): 151-189

• 11/6 – PROPERTY CRIME: THEFT – in Chronicling America newspapers
  • Search: embezzlement; theft; stealing; stolen; larceny; shoplifting

 

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Week 12:

• 11/11 – PROPERTY CRIME: COUNTERFEITING & FORGERY
  • Resource for assignment#4
    • David Johnson, Illegal Tender: Counterfeiting and the Secret Service in Nineteenth-Century America, chap. 2:  37-64; & chap. 7: Crime and Power, 171-180 (available from Dr Robertson)

• 11/13 – PROPERTY CRIME: COUNTERFEITING & FORGERY – in Chronicling America newspapers
  • Search: counterfeit; forgery

 

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Week 13:

• 11/18 – PROPERTY CRIME: ARSON
  • Resources for assignment#4
    • Victor Jew, “The “meanest man in the world”: Arson in the United States: A history of legal and social responses to incendiarism, 1870-1920 (PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1994), Conclusion, 383-393
    • Albert Smith, “”Southern Violence” Reconsidered: Arson as Protest in Black-Belt Georgia, 1865-1910,” Journal of Southern History 51, 4 (1985)

• 11/20 – PROPERTY CRIME: ARSON – in Chronicling America newspapers
  • • • Search: arson; incendiary; firebug

 

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Week 14:

• 11/21  – NO CLASS

• 11/23 – THANKSGIVING – NO CLASS

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Week 15

• 12/2 – WORKING WITH YOUR DATA
  • Creating a dataset – Instructions
  • Importing your dataset into Omeka S – Instructions

• 12/4 – WORKING WITH OMEKA S
  • Adding an item to Omeka S – Instructions
  • Creating a site in Omeka S – Instructions
  • Creating pages in Omeka S – Instructions
  • Organize your pages in Omeka S – Instructions
  • Mapping your dataset in Omeka S – Instructions
  • Creating a chart in Google sheets – Instructions