Available From UC Press

Murder in New York City dramatically expands what we know about urban homicide, and challenges some of the things we think we know. Eric Monkkonen's unprecedented investigation covers two centuries of murder in America's biggest city, combining newly assembled statistical evidence with many other documentary sources to tease out the story behind the figures.

As we generally believe, the last part of the twentieth century was unusually violent, but there have been other high-violence eras as well: the late 1920s and the mid-nineteenth century, the latter because the absence of high-quality weapons and ammunition makes that era's stabbings and beatings seem almost more vicious. Monkkonen's long view allows us to look back to a time when guns were rarer, when poverty was more widespread, and when racial discrimination was more intense, and to ask what difference these things made. With many vivid case studies for illustration, he examines the crucial factors in killing through the years: the weapons of choice, the sex and age of offenders and victims, the circumstances and settings in which homicide tends to occur, and the race and ethnicity of murderers and their victims.

In a final chapter, Monkkonen looks to the international context and shows that New York—and, by extension, the United States—has had consistently higher violence levels than London and Liverpool. No single factor, he says, shapes this excessive violence, but exploring the variables of age, ethnicity, weapons, and demography over the long term can lead to hope of changing old patterns.

Eric H. Monkkonen is Professor of History and Policy Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Author of The Local State (1995) and America Becomes Urban (California, 1988), he is also editor of the eleven-volume Crime and Justice in American History (1991).

"Brilliant and original in very many ways, with nice touches of wit. I can think of no book on homicide from which I’ve learned more: the biggest, longest, and most careful longitudinal study ever, in the world’s most important city."—Roger Lane, author of Murder in America

"Eric Monkkonen is one of the world's leading crime historians. With characteristic diligence, he has gone back 200 years to capture the records on all homicides in New York City, consistently the nation's big city, and so a good model for urban homicide more generally. He explores in considerable detail the changing dimensions of demography, relationships, situations, and weaponry, thereby providing important insights that would not emerge from the more typical short-term analysis."—Alfred Blumstein, coeditor of The Crime Drop in America

"The topic is obviously important, the research remarkable, the analysis very interesting, and the writing engaging. Despite the grim subject, this book is fun to read."—Ken Pomeranz, author of The Great Divergence