It's no secret that America is polarized. Now a new book makes the case that our relationship to government may explain rises and falls in another U.S. pastime: murder. In American Homicide, Randolph Roth, a professor of history and criminology at Ohio State, traces the history of our murdering ways through the lens of our feelings about those in power. (Click here to follow Raina Kelley)
Even putting aside our obsession with crime-fighting TV shows, we live in an incredibly violent country. That's been true since the early 19th century when we became the most homicidal country in the Western world—a title we still hold. As Roth writes, "two-thirds of the world's people live in nations that are less homicidal than the United States." And he does not hesitate to use statistics to an even more dramatic effect: "nearly 1 of every 200 children born today will be murdered."
What Homicide also does is upend much of the conventional wisdom about crime. Even casual followers of the news can recite the most commonly named causes of American homicide: institutional poverty, class envy, lax gun laws, gangs, drugs, and the TV favorites—jealousy, greed, and unrequited love. But none of those reasons accounts fully for either the fluctuation of murder rates over hundreds of years or the consistently high rates that have always been our country's burden.
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