John Carter Wood

• PhD, British History, 2001
• PostDoc Position at Leibniz Institute of European History

This article considers reader responses to newspaper coverage of a British murder case in 1928. Accused of the arsenic murder of her husband, Beatrice Pace became a fixture on the front pages of the British press. More than two hundred letters sent to her after her acquittal have survived in papers kept by her solicitor. Although far from a perfect...

The late 1920s saw a dramatic upsurge in popular concern about the abuse of police powers in Britain, the end result of a longer-term trend. Various aspects of policing were seen as worrying, but the most important concerned illegitimate forms of questioning. The phrase 'the third degree'--imported from America--came to encapsulate this unease. Bef...

Despite lively debates in many related fields about whether biological and evolutionary approaches can contribute to social and cultural investigations of human behaviour, historians have rarely confronted this issue directly. The historiography of violence is a partial exception, but there has been relatively little interdisciplinary exchange on t...

This article considers how a British Christian intellectual group perceived the crises of the 1930s and 1940s as an epochal transformation and sought to restore ‘true’ freedom to a society dominated by ‘materialism’ and the loss of ‘community’. It sought to make Christianity relevant in new, ‘modern’ circumstances, asserting the transcendent elemen...

This introductory article contextualises relevant historiography and explores definitions of ‘modernity’, ‘modernisation’ and ‘secularisation’. The twentieth century posed distinct challenges to efforts to relate faith to the social order: accelerating industrialisation, urbanisation and functional differentiation as well as the growing impact of t...

In inter-war Britain, crime narratives were a key location for expressing social anxieties and views of the law-enforcement and justice systems. But given the breadth and diversity of the media landscape in this period, crime narratives were complex. Crime historiography has largely focused on negative depictions of criminals and positive depiction...

Psychologists have long stressed the role of the unspoken in human interaction. A posture or gesture, a glance or a stance says much about what someone wishes to convey and how (consciously or unconsciously) they wish to present themselves. Such factors can also greatly impact on how people are viewed by observers. But if the subtleties of pose and...

This is a short contribution to the forthcoming twentieth-anniversary special issue of _Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History and Societies_, 2017, on future agendas for research on the history of crime and criminal justice. It argues that historians of violence should take into account -- and attempt to learn from -- evolutionary psychologic...

Drew D. Gray . Crime, Policing and Punishment in England, 1660–1914. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Pp. 393. $122.00 (cloth). - Volume 56 Issue 2 - John Carter Wood

This is the flyer (and table of contents) for my forthcoming edited collection. The collection explores how Christian individuals and institutions – whether Churches, church-related organisations, clergy, or lay thinkers – combined the topics of faith and national identity in twentieth-century Europe. “National identity” is understood in a broad s...

This collection explores how Christian individuals and institutions – whether Churches, church-related organisations, clergy, or lay thinkers – combined the topics of faith and national identity in twentieth-century Europe. “National identity” is understood in a broad sense that includes discourses of citizenship, narratives of cultural or linguist...

Economic crises and the rise of totalitarianism in the late 1930s brought forth a plethora of plans from representatives of a broad range of political and social perspectives to renew European culture. Christians were no less active than other groups in such discussions. The international ecumenical ‘Church, Community and State’ conference held in...

In the summer of 1928, the arrest on a disorder charge of a young woman in north London who gave her name as Helene Adele led to a press sensation after she claimed that the officers had falsely accused her in order to discredit her claim that one of them had sexually assaulted her. The constables were ultimately prosecuted, convicted and discharge...

This article explores how attitudes to black people were translated into practice by examining how the latter fared as victims, witnesses and especially as the accused when they came to the Old Bailey in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It concludes that there was no significant discrimination against black people as prosecutors and w...

In this essay, I examine the public discourse about Oswald Spengler's ideas in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly the »cultural morphology« he developed in his two-volume work Der Untergang des Abendlandes (translated into English in the second half of the 1920s as Decline of the West). Previous work has suggested that Spengler’s work was...

Although historians have (understandably) emphasised the ways that the popular media have presented criminals as a prominent social fear, there have been times in twentieth-century Britain during which crime-fighting has faced equally intense media criticism. The late 1920s saw a (now largely forgotten) popular concern about the potential abuse of...

This book offers the first in-depth study of one of the most gripping trials of inter-war Britain, that of farmer’s wife Beatrice Pace for the arsenic murder of her husband. A riveting tale from the golden age of press sensationalism, the book offers insights into the era’s justice system, gender debates, and celebrity culture. Based on extensive r...

RosnerLisa. The Anatomy Murders: Being the True and Spectacular History of Edinburgh's Notorious Burke and Hare and of the Man of Science Who Abetted Them in the Commission of Their Most Heinous Crimes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Pp. 328. $29.95 (cloth). - Volume 49 Issue 4 - John Carter Wood

KleinJoanne. Invisible Men: The Secret Lives of Police Constables in Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham, 1900–1939. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010. Pp. 334. $95.00 (cloth); $34.95 (paper). - Volume 50 Issue 4 - John Carter Wood

Late 1920s Britain saw dramatic press and political debates resulting from a series of police scandals involving questionable arrests, illegitimate interrogation methods and corruption. Although historians have downplayed the impact of politics on inter-war criminal justice, they played an important role in these debates: the Labour Party and the l...

David Taylor’s Hooligans, Harlots and Hangmen joins several recent books offering overviews of crime historiography. This trend is welcome, as crime and justice history has become very active indeed, generating not only a broad range of empirical findings but also important conceptual debates related to crime and historians’ ability (or lack thereo...

Much of J. G. Ballard’s writing involves variations on a recurrent theme: the interaction between twentieth-century society and enduring human psychological drives. Impulsivity, self-control and aggression are central topics for him. Thus, it is curious that his fiction has yet to be examined in light of a theory with similar interests that has gre...

Although these two books join a now substantial literature on crime history, they consider an aspect of that topic that still remains relatively understudied: women’s participation in crime, particularly violent crime. Both focus on the eighteenth century, but they have divergent approaches and tackle different geographic locations, each of which,...

Our article addresses the question “How is culture biological?” by considering violence. Historians of violence have focused on issues such as foresight, self-control, sympathy and inequality without sufficiently considering the psychological underpinnings of the social and cultural factors they emphasise. At the same time, an approach to the issue...

Perceptions of violence played an important role in the efforts of middle-class Britons to understand their working- and lower-class compatriots in the nineteenth century, a process that required that the former also consider the spaces in which latter lived. This scrutiny of violence lower down the social scale also influenced the contours of midd...

‘Justice’ is a historical phenomenon: legal institutions and cultural attitudes (along with their various languages) vary across geography and time. At the same time, enduring elements of human psychology and recurring patterns in social structures provide continuities which allow the past to speak to contemporary issues. To understand the ‘experie...

Ian McEwan's 1992 novel Black Dogs employs postmodern understandings of history while also critiquing these same perspectives. In particular, by depicting the efforts of its protagonist, Jeremy, to write a memoir of his parents-in-law, it draws attention to the subjectivity of historical writing. While this quality has led some critics to condemn t...

The historiography of modern English violence has now developed to the point where the need for a synthesis is becoming urgent, particularly one capable of using the topic of violence to make broader points about the history of English society. If it were also able to question popular nostalgia for a mythic past era of tranquility, that would be an...

Over the past two decades of crime historiography, violence has been increasingly approached as a cultural issue. Undoubtedly, the complexity of attitudes towards violence in our own time is obvious, whether one considers the equivocal relationship between the perception and reality of crime rates or recurring discussions about the appropriate leve...

Recent debates about the meaning and role of cultural history have focused on the relationship between 'culture' and 'society'. Some have taken this opportunity to position cultural history as a site of resistance to 'biological' explanations of human behaviour. In contrast, this article argues that 'biological' methodologies - particularly the per...

The historiography of violence has undergone a distinct cultural turn as attention has shifted from examining violence as a clearly defined (and countable) social problem to analysing its historically defined 'social meaning'. Nevertheless, the precise nature of the relationship between 'violence' and 'culture' is still being established. How are '...

The historical development of attitudes toward violence has been connected to changing ideas about space. The connection between ‘cultures of violence’ and particular ‘geographies of violence’ is of increasing interest within historical violence studies; nevertheless, there is a continuing need to explore ways of conceptualising that interaction. T...

Jennine Hurl-Eamon's Gender and Petty Violence in London, 1680-1720 joins a rapidly expanding field of historical violence studies, and the book's focus on "petty" violence—physically or verbally aggressive acts seen as "relatively minor, but nonetheless unacceptable" (2)—fits squarely within the historiographic turn from spectacular crime toward v...

Why does violence seem to haunt modern civilization? Can violence "speak", and if so, what can it tell us? Where do our attitudes toward violence come from? This book examines these questions by considering a critical period in the evolution of attitudes toward violence. Using the English experience, it explores the meanings of violence through an...

Although studying the history of violence invites a broad methodological and topical diversity, three issues have predominated: the relationship between quantitative and qualitative methods, the notion of a "civilizing process," and the topic of gender. As "violence" refers to physical acts as well as to cultural understandings of those acts, comin...

DuckworthJeannie. Fagin's Children: Criminal Children in Victorian England. New York: Hambledon and London; dist. by Palgrave, New York. 2002. Pp. x, 258. $29.95. ISBN 1-85285-391-3. - Volume 36 Issue 2 - J. Carter Wood

Historical violence studies are being increasingly influenced by theoretical approaches which focus on the development of ‘cultures of violence’. However, this growing interest in the interconnections between violence and culture faces a number of significant challenges posed by the influence of disciplines other than history as well as by internal...

KnaflaLouis A., ed. Policing and War in Europe. (Criminal Justice History, Volume 16.) Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. 2002. Pp. xvi, 218. $64.95. ISBN 0-313- 31012-2. - Volume 35 Issue 3 - J. Carter Wood

Why does violence seem to haunt modern civilization? Can violence “speak,” and if so, what can it tell us? Violence and Crime in Nineteenth-Century England: The Shadow of Our Refinement examines these questions by considering a critical period in the evolution of attitudes toward violence. Using the English experience to explore questions about the...

‘A Useful Savagery: The Invention of Violence in Nineteenth-Century England’ considers a particular configuration of attitudes toward violence that emerged in the early decades of the nineteenth century. As part of a longer-term process of emerging ‘sensibilities,’ violence was, seemingly paradoxically, ‘invented’ as a social issue while concurrent...

Journal of Social History 37.1 (2003) 242-244 Compared to the East and West Indies, the Middle East or Africa, the Ionian Islands occupy a relatively minor role in the historiography of British colonialism: the islands themselves are small, direct British rule was relatively brief (their protectorate lasted from 1815 to 1864) and their complex geog...

In Britain, recent years have seen increasing criticism of police ineffectiveness, high-profile incidents of vigilantism and interest in alternatives to traditional policing. In light of these trends, this article first considers nineteenth-century community «self-policing», which ordered social relations according to a more diffuse distribution of...

Historians’ growing interest in comparative perspectives on violence raises several methodological and conceptual questions: some are common to violence history more generally, while others are brought into sharper relief by cross-cultural and interdisciplinary studies. This essay surveys the existing state of comparative violence history, consider...

Journal of Social History 36.2 (2002) 479-481 The appearance of a general textbook on the history of European violence is, in itself, a significant event. Historical violence studies proliferated in the 1990s as violence—previously treated largely as a sub-topic of crime—emerged as a subject in its own right. However, focused studies have been, wit...

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Maryland at College Park, 1994. Thesis research directed by Dept. of History. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 206-210).