@article{351798,
      recid = {351798},
      author = {Roth, Randolph,},
      title = {American homicide [electronic resource] /},
      publisher = {Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,},
      address = {Cambridge, Mass. :},
      pages = {1 online resource (xv, 655 p.) :},
      year = {2009},
      note = {Description based on print version record.},
      abstract = {Randolph Roth charts changes in the character and  incidence of homicide in the U.S. from colonial times to  the present. He argues that the United States is  distinctive in its level of violence among unrelated  adults--friends, acquaintances, and strangers. America was  extraordinarily homicidal in the mid-seventeenth century,  but it became relatively non-homicidal by the  mid-eighteenth century. Then the homicide rate skyrocketed  from the late 1840s through the mid-1870s, while rates in  most other Western nations held steady or fell. That  surge--and all subsequent increases in the homicide  rate--correlated closely with four distinct phenomena:  political instability; a loss of government legitimacy; a  loss of fellow-feeling among members of society caused by  racial, religious, or political antagonism; and a loss of  faith in the social hierarchy. Those four factors, Roth  argues, best explain why homicide rates have gone up and  down over the past four centuries, and why the United  States is today the most homicidal affluent nation.--From  publisher description.},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/351798},
}