Jeffrey S Adler
Biographic Data
| ID | 366743 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jeffrey S Adler |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jeffrey S |
| FAMILY NAME | Adler |
| SIGNATURE | ADLER J S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Florida |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 45 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 66 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 45 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803–1930 by John K. Bardes (review)
Born in Blood: Violence and the Making of America by Scott Gac
The United States may or may not be the land of freedom, a beacon of liberty, and a city upon a hill, but it is undeniable that it stands alone among affluent nations in its violence, with homicide rates towering above those of every comparable nation. Levels of interpersonal conflict have waxed and waned over time, and historians and criminologists have devoted enormous attention to these patterns, producing a rich scholarly literature on the hi…
I Laid Earl and Clementine on a Chair and Whipped Them’: Child Murder and Criminal Justice in the Jim Crow South
This article explores a horrific 1945 child murder in New Orleans and argues that the case revealed broader developments in Southern criminal justice in the age of Jim Crow. Ernestine Bonneval tied her young children to an ironing board and lashed them, killing her 7-year-old daughter. The murder generated outrage, with residents demanding severe punishment, even the gallows, for the brutal crime. After a jury returned a guilty verdict, the judge…
Administering Freedom: The State of Emancipation after the Freedmen's Bureau
Journal Article Administering Freedom: The State of Emancipation after the Freedmen's Bureau Get access Administering Freedom: The State of Emancipation after the Freedmen's Bureau. By Dale Kretz. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. 412 pp. Cloth, $110.00. Paper, $39.95.) Jeffrey S Adler Jeffrey S Adler University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal …
I’m at My Rope’s End”: Suicide in New Orleans, 1920–1940
For over a century, researchers have argued that suicide in the United States fluctuates with business cycles, rising during downturns, when "deaths of despair" skyrocket, and falling during flush periods. Using case-level data from autopsy reports and suicide notes, this essay analyzes suicide trends in New Orleans between 1920 and 1940, an era that included immense prosperity and the Great Depression. Thus, the essay draws from quantitative and…
Guns and Violence: Weapon Instrumentality in New Orleans Homicide, 1920-1945
Criminologists, sociologists, and public-health scholars have devoted enormous attention to the role of firearms in violence, particularly regarding American homicide rates, but historians have been less inclined to examine the impact of firearms, especially their availability, on changing patterns of violence. Instead, legal and criminal-justice historians have emphasized the ways in which institutional, cultural, political, and social changes h…
To Stay the Murderer’s Hand and the Rapist’s Passions, and for the Safety and Security of Civil Society’: The Emergence of Racial Disparities in Capital Punishment in Jim Crow New Orleans
This essay examines capital punishment in New Orleans between 1920 and 1945. Building on a quantitative analysis of case-level data culled from police, court, and prison records, it explores the emergence of racial disparities in death-penalty sentencing and charts the increasing use of capital punishment as a mechanism of racial control. The paper focuses on four surprising and counter-intuitive patterns in the application of the death penalty. …
Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic
The criminalization of American poverty has a long history and has borrowed from legal practices in Elizabethan England. In a prodigiously researched study, Kristin O'Brassill-Kulfan examines the treatment of indigent transients in the early nineteenth-century mid-Atlantic region. Vagrants and Vagabonds devotes particular attention to the disjuncture between Anglo-American legal traditions for managing the wandering poor and the labor-market dema…
Capital and Convict: Race, Region, and Punishment in Post-Civil War America
Capital and Convict: Race, Region, and Punishment in Post-Civil War America." American Nineteenth Century History, 19(3), pp. 332–333
Kelly Lytle Hernández. City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965
Chicago on the Make: Power and Inequality in a Modern City
For the last two decades, scholars from a wide range of disciplines have analyzed the ascent of neoliberalism. Much of the work on this topic takes a top-down approach, describing how shifts in international finance and transnational markets fueled inequality, undermined social justice, and gutted social-welfare institutions. Focusing on twentieth-century Chicago, Diamond explores the rise of neoliberalism from the bottom up and from the middle o…
The Greatest Thrill I Get is When I Hear a Criminal Say, ‘Yes, I Did it’”: Race and the Third Degree in New Orleans, 1920–1945
On May 11, 1938, two New Orleans policemen entered the Astoria Restaurant, marched to the kitchen, and approached Loyd D. T. Washington, a 41-year-old African American cook. They informed Washington that they would be taking him to the First Precinct station for questioning, although they assured the cook that he need not change his clothes and “should be right back” to the “Negro restaurant,” where he had worked for 3 years. Immediately after ar…
Spineless Judges and Shyster Lawyers”: Criminal Justice in New Orleans, 1920–1945
Focusing on the prosecution of homicide cases, this essay analyzes the operation of the criminal justice system in New Orleans from 1920 through 1945. Despite the far-ranging legal and institutional developments of the era, few homicide suspects were convicted—only 17.8 percent. Race-based patterns of prosecution and conviction, however, diverged during this period. For white suspects, conviction rates dropped by one-third, while for African Amer…
Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI . By Jessica R. Pliley
Journal Article Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI. By Jessica R. Pliley Get access Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI. By Jessica R. Pliley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. 293 pp. $29.95). Jeffrey S. Adler Jeffrey S. Adler University of Florida [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 50, Issue 1, Fall …
The Color of Night: Race, Railroaders, and Murder in the Wartime West . By Max G. Geier
On 23 January 1943, Martha James, a young, white war bride from Virginia was brutally murdered on a train in rural Oregon. Although circumstantial evidence pointed to the white Marine who discovered the dying woman, investigators focused their attention on an African American trainman, Robert E. Lee Folkes. Based on questionable evidence, Folkes was arrested, tried, convicted, and executed. In The Color of Night, Max G. Geier analyzes this case, …
The Killer Behind the Badge”: Race and Police Homicide In New Orleans, 1925–1945
At 5:45 p.m. on Thursday, June 17, 1943, New Orleans police patrolman John Licali fatally shot 29-year-old Felton Robinson, an unemployed presser. A few minutes earlier, a neighbor had heard a disturbance in the backyard of Robinson's Loyola Street home and had alerted the Twelfth Precinct police station, which dispatched officers Licali and Emile Eskine to investigate. When they arrived, however, they found no signs of disorder. The policemen as…
Cognitive Bias: Interracial Homicide in New Orleans, 1921-1945
White killers of African Americans in New Orleans between 1921 and 1945, nearly half of whom were policemen, insisted that they acted in self-defense, only after their victims had threatened them, often by reaching for weapons. But many of their victims were unarmed. The conventional interpretation is that white residents invoked a formulaic justification of self-defense to mask their real intention, to uphold the city's racial hierarchy. Recent …
Short Notices
Shoot to Kill: The Use of Deadly Force by the Chicago Police, 1875-1920
The American police have a long history of relying on violence. In Chicago, however, the widespread use of deadly force did not date to the rough-hewn, early days of nineteenth-century policing. Rather, an analysis of more than 300 killings by Chicago policemen from 1875 through 1920 reveals that the frequent resort to deadly force began during the Progressive era. In this period, a formal shoot-to-kill, law-enforcement strategy developed in resp…
First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt: Homicide in Chicago, 1875-1920
Between 1875 and 1920, Chicago's homicide rate more than quadrupled. Based on an analysis of nearly six thousand homicide cases, First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt examines the ways in which industrialization, immigration, poverty, ethnic and racial conflict, and powerful cultural forces reshaped Chicago city life and generated soaring levels of lethal violence. From rage killers to the "Baby Bandit Quartet," Jeffrey Adler offers a dramatic portr…
St. Louis in the Century of Henry Shaw: A View beyond the Garden Wall
Journal Article St. Louis in the Century of Henry Shaw: A View beyond the Garden Wall Get access St. Louis in the Century of Henry Shaw: A View beyond the Garden Wall. Edited with an introduction by Sandweiss Eric. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. xviii + 251 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $32.50.) Jeffrey S. Adler Jeffrey S. Adler University of Florida Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Weste…
We've Got a Right to Fight; We're Married: Domestic Homicide in Chicago, 1875-1920
Scholars often treat family violence as a single category and argue that domestic violence typically reflects conflict over gender roles. Such a focus has been well placed. But if data on domestic homicide in Chicago from 1875 to 1920 are disaggregated by ethnicity and race, important patterns emerge. Domestic homicide, for example, assumed culturally specific forms. German immigrants, Italian immigrants, and African-American Chicagoans killed lo…
African-American Mayors: Race, Politics, and the American City
How African-American mayors of major cities from Los Angeles to New York and Detroit to New Orleans met the post-election challenges of decaying inner cities, white flight, entrenched local power structures, and multiple demands from their diverse constituencies
Gilded City: Scandal and Sensation in Turn-of-the-Century New York
The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896. By Sven Beckert. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xx, 492 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-521-79039-5.) On February 10, 1897, Bradley and Cornelia Martin hosted a lavish masquerade ball at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Adorned as kings and queens, the guests wore garish costumes, some costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. This social event occupies …
Halting the Slaughter of the Innocents”: The Civilizing Process and the Surge in Violence in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago
In 1906, the Reverend Frank G. Smith, of Chicago’s Warren Avenue Congregational Church, warned that “we are in the throes of a moral spasm” (Chicago Tribune, 22 January 1906). The Reverend W. R. Leach shared this view, bemoaning that “not in twenty years as pastor in Chicago have I seen crime as it stalks to-day. It is an epidemical scourge” (Chicago Record-Herald, 26 September 1904). Another critic termed the city “Satan’s sanctum” (Curon 1899).…
Crime and Punishment in America
Crime and Punishment in America. Prod. by David Rabinovich, Bill Jersey, and Pierre Valette. KCET-Los Angeles, 1996. 120mins. (PBS Video, 1320 Braddock Pl., Alexandria, VA 22314-1698) Get access Jeffrey S. Adler Jeffrey S. Adler University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 84, Issue 3, December 1997, Pages 1161–1162, https://doi.org/10.2307…
A Historical Analysis of the Law of Vagrancy
For more than two decades William Chambliss's analysis of vagrancy law has provided criminologists with historical evidence to support class‐based explanations for the development of criminal law. Chambliss's use of the historical record, however, is suggestive more than it is conclusive, and recent studies of vagrancy law have exposed important shortcomings in his model. In fact, a systematic examination of the history of vagrancy law reveals th…
The making of a moral panic in 19th-century America: The boston garroting hysteria of 1865
Much of the scholarly literature on moral panics focuses on the relationship between background pressures and interest group activities. Through an analysis of an 1865 crime wave in Boston, this essay explores the eruption of a panic in 19th‐century America and identifies a third variable that contributes to the creation of moral panics. This article argues that background pressures and the efforts of claim‐makers represented important preconditi…
Vagging the Demons and Scoundrels: Vagrancy and the Growth of St. Louis, 1830-1861
Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833-1872
Journal Article Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833–1872. By Robin L. Einhorn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. xviii + 295 pp. $34.95 and Yankee Merchants and the Making of the Urban West: The Rise and Fall of Antebellum St. Louis. By Jeffrey S. Adler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. viii + 274 pp. $42.50 Get access Harold L. Platt Harold L. Platt Loyola University Chicago Search for other works by this aut…
The Killer Behind the Badge”: Race and Police Homicide In New Orleans, 1925–1945
At 5:45 p.m. on Thursday, June 17, 1943, New Orleans police patrolman John Licali fatally shot 29-year-old Felton Robinson, an unemployed presser. A few minutes earlier, a neighbor had heard a disturbance in the backyard of Robinson's Loyola Street home and had alerted the Twelfth Precinct police station, which dispatched officers Licali and Emile Eskine to investigate. When they arrived, however, they found no signs of disorder. The policemen as…
If We Can’t Live in Peace, We Might as Well Die”: Homicide-Suicide in Chicago, 1875-1910
Rejoinder to Chambliss
To Stay the Murderer’s Hand and the Rapist’s Passions, and for the Safety and Security of Civil Society’: The Emergence of Racial Disparities in Capital Punishment in Jim Crow New Orleans
This essay examines capital punishment in New Orleans between 1920 and 1945. Building on a quantitative analysis of case-level data culled from police, court, and prison records, it explores the emergence of racial disparities in death-penalty sentencing and charts the increasing use of capital punishment as a mechanism of racial control. The paper focuses on four surprising and counter-intuitive patterns in the application of the death penalty. …
Cognitive Bias: Interracial Homicide in New Orleans, 1921-1945
White killers of African Americans in New Orleans between 1921 and 1945, nearly half of whom were policemen, insisted that they acted in self-defense, only after their victims had threatened them, often by reaching for weapons. But many of their victims were unarmed. The conventional interpretation is that white residents invoked a formulaic justification of self-defense to mask their real intention, to uphold the city's racial hierarchy. Recent …
Shoot to Kill: The Use of Deadly Force by the Chicago Police, 1875-1920
The American police have a long history of relying on violence. In Chicago, however, the widespread use of deadly force did not date to the rough-hewn, early days of nineteenth-century policing. Rather, an analysis of more than 300 killings by Chicago policemen from 1875 through 1920 reveals that the frequent resort to deadly force began during the Progressive era. In this period, a formal shoot-to-kill, law-enforcement strategy developed in resp…
We've Got a Right to Fight; We're Married: Domestic Homicide in Chicago, 1875-1920
Scholars often treat family violence as a single category and argue that domestic violence typically reflects conflict over gender roles. Such a focus has been well placed. But if data on domestic homicide in Chicago from 1875 to 1920 are disaggregated by ethnicity and race, important patterns emerge. Domestic homicide, for example, assumed culturally specific forms. German immigrants, Italian immigrants, and African-American Chicagoans killed lo…
Cities of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century Images of Urban Development
Journal Article Cities of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century Images of Urban Development. By John W. Reps. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994. viii, 342 pp. $85.00, ISBN 0-82620939-4.) Get access Jeffrey S. Adler Jeffrey S. Adler University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 82, Issue 2, September 1995, Pages 728–729, https://doi…
Vagging the Demons and Scoundrels: Vagrancy and the Growth of St. Louis, 1830-1861
A Historical Analysis of the Law of Vagrancy
For more than two decades William Chambliss's analysis of vagrancy law has provided criminologists with historical evidence to support class‐based explanations for the development of criminal law. Chambliss's use of the historical record, however, is suggestive more than it is conclusive, and recent studies of vagrancy law have exposed important shortcomings in his model. In fact, a systematic examination of the history of vagrancy law reveals th…
Rejoinder to Chambliss
River Towns in the Great West: The Structure of Provincial Urbanization in the American Midwest, 1820-1870
Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833-1872
Journal Article Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833–1872. By Robin L. Einhorn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. xviii + 295 pp. $34.95 and Yankee Merchants and the Making of the Urban West: The Rise and Fall of Antebellum St. Louis. By Jeffrey S. Adler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. viii + 274 pp. $42.50 Get access Harold L. Platt Harold L. Platt Loyola University Chicago Search for other works by this aut…
Little Germany: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in New York City, 1845-80
Yankee Merchants and the Making of the Urban West: The Rise and Fall of Antebellum St. Louis
Journal Article Yankee Merchants and the Making of the Urban West: The Rise and Fall of Antebellum St. Louis Get access Yankee Merchants and the Making of the Urban West: The Rise and Fall of Antebellum St. Louis. By Adler Jeffrey S.. (Cambridge, ENG: Cambridge University Press, 1991. vii + 274 pp. Table, notes, bibliography, index. $42.50.) Alan Lessoff Alan Lessoff Corpus Christi State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford…
Yankee Merchants and the Making of the Urban West: The Rise and Fall of Antebellum St. Louis
St. Louis Blues: Business, Slavery, and Urban History
As American settlers streamed ever further westward during the first half of the nineteenth century, St. Louis, Missouri, became a commercial boomtown and the leading city of the Mississippi valley. Its population nearly quintupled during the 1840s, and by 1850 its prosperous merchants were servicing a rural hinterland that extended northward into the upper Midwest and westward from the lower Ohio River to the frontier. Business has never been mo…
Turning the Machine into a Horn of Plenty
The communitarian and utopian movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have commanded considerable attention from American historians. Fourierism, Owenism, and Transcendentalism, for example, have received thoughtful book-length treatments, as have later movements, such as those sparked by Edward Bellamy and Eugene V. Debs. Cultural and intellectual historians have attempted to identify common themes, to place these crusades in b…
Yankee Merchants and the Making of the Urban West: The Rise and Fall of Antebellum St. Louis. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Modern History
The dynamite, wreckage, and scum in our cities: The social construction of deviance in industrial America
Capital and Entrepreneurship in the Great West
Capital and Entrepreneurship in the Great West Both nineteenth-century observers and modern scholars have celebrated Chicago's distinctiveness. To those who witnessed the lake city's explosive growth during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the city's ascent seemed unique and unprecedented. Twentieth-century analysts have provided sophisticated and thoughtful examinations of the great western metropolis' development, although they too…
Cities of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century Images of Urban Development
Journal Article Cities of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century Images of Urban Development. By John W. Reps. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994. viii, 342 pp. $85.00, ISBN 0-82620939-4.) Get access Jeffrey S. Adler Jeffrey S. Adler University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 82, Issue 2, September 1995, Pages 728–729, https://doi…
The making of a moral panic in 19th-century America: The boston garroting hysteria of 1865
Much of the scholarly literature on moral panics focuses on the relationship between background pressures and interest group activities. Through an analysis of an 1865 crime wave in Boston, this essay explores the eruption of a panic in 19th‐century America and identifies a third variable that contributes to the creation of moral panics. This article argues that background pressures and the efforts of claim‐makers represented important preconditi…
Crime and Punishment in America
Crime and Punishment in America. Prod. by David Rabinovich, Bill Jersey, and Pierre Valette. KCET-Los Angeles, 1996. 120mins. (PBS Video, 1320 Braddock Pl., Alexandria, VA 22314-1698) Get access Jeffrey S. Adler Jeffrey S. Adler University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 84, Issue 3, December 1997, Pages 1161–1162, https://doi.org/10.2307…
If We Can’t Live in Peace, We Might as Well Die”: Homicide-Suicide in Chicago, 1875-1910
Roots of Disorder: Race and Criminal Justice in the American South, 1817-80
Roots of Disorder: Race and Criminal Justice in the American South, 1817–80
Roots of Disorder: Race and Criminal Justice in the American South, 1817–80 Get access Waldrep Christopher, Roots of Disorder: Race and Criminal Justice in the American South, 1817–80. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998. xiv, 267 pp. $45.00 (cloth). $18.95 (paper). Jeffrey S. Adler Jeffrey S. Adler University of Florida Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar American Journal of Legal History, …
Young Men and Violence
Halting the Slaughter of the Innocents”: The Civilizing Process and the Surge in Violence in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago
In 1906, the Reverend Frank G. Smith, of Chicago’s Warren Avenue Congregational Church, warned that “we are in the throes of a moral spasm” (Chicago Tribune, 22 January 1906). The Reverend W. R. Leach shared this view, bemoaning that “not in twenty years as pastor in Chicago have I seen crime as it stalks to-day. It is an epidemical scourge” (Chicago Record-Herald, 26 September 1904). Another critic termed the city “Satan’s sanctum” (Curon 1899).…
African-American Mayors: Race, Politics, and the American City
How African-American mayors of major cities from Los Angeles to New York and Detroit to New Orleans met the post-election challenges of decaying inner cities, white flight, entrenched local power structures, and multiple demands from their diverse constituencies
Gilded City: Scandal and Sensation in Turn-of-the-Century New York
The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896. By Sven Beckert. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xx, 492 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-521-79039-5.) On February 10, 1897, Bradley and Cornelia Martin hosted a lavish masquerade ball at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Adorned as kings and queens, the guests wore garish costumes, some costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. This social event occupies …
St. Louis in the Century of Henry Shaw: A View beyond the Garden Wall
Journal Article St. Louis in the Century of Henry Shaw: A View beyond the Garden Wall Get access St. Louis in the Century of Henry Shaw: A View beyond the Garden Wall. Edited with an introduction by Sandweiss Eric. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. xviii + 251 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $32.50.) Jeffrey S. Adler Jeffrey S. Adler University of Florida Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Weste…
We've Got a Right to Fight; We're Married: Domestic Homicide in Chicago, 1875-1920
Scholars often treat family violence as a single category and argue that domestic violence typically reflects conflict over gender roles. Such a focus has been well placed. But if data on domestic homicide in Chicago from 1875 to 1920 are disaggregated by ethnicity and race, important patterns emerge. Domestic homicide, for example, assumed culturally specific forms. German immigrants, Italian immigrants, and African-American Chicagoans killed lo…
Political science (34 works) · Sociology (31 works) · Law (29 works) · History (26 works) · Criminology (24 works) · History (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Race, History, and American Society (17 works) · American History and Culture (16 works) · Psychology (11 works)