National Police Gazette and the Making of the Modern American Man, 1879-1906


Book Description

This book analyzes the National Police Gazette, the racy New York City tabloid that gained an audience among men and boys of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Looking at how images of sex, crime, and sports reflected and shaped masculinities during this watershed era, this book amounts to a story of what it meant to be an American man at the beginning of the American Century.




The Police Gazette


Book Description

Articles and woodcuts published during the years 1878-1897 in the National police gazette.




Hitler Is Alive!


Book Description

Actual articles from the notorious sensationalist journal that was a forerunner to the scandal sheets and tabloids of today: “Ridiculous alt-history fun” (Booklist). As the Allied armies closed in on Berlin, the Nazi high command scrambled to escape their shattered city. On May 1, 1945, reports went out that Adolf Hitler and his mistress, Eva Braun, committed suicide in an underground bunker—but their bodies were never found. In this landmark exposé by the legendary National Police Gazette, the truth is finally told. As peace fell across Europe, two U-Boats made mad dashes for Argentina, remaining underwater for weeks at a time to evade detection. In their incredible journeys lies the shocking secret of how the greatest mass murderer in history escaped punishment for his crimes. In the aftermath of World War II, the Police Gazette ruthlessly investigated any rumor of Hitler’s survival in South America. Hitler Is Alive! is a true epic of twentieth-century sensationalism.







The Culture of Crime


Book Description

There is no journalistic work more deserving of the designation “story” than news of crime. From antiquity, the culture of crime has been about the human condition, and whether information comes from Homer, Hollywood, or the city desk, it is a bottom about the human capacity for cruelty and suffering, about desperation and fear, about sex, race, and public morals. Facts are important to the telling of a crime story, but ultimately less so than the often apocryphal narratives we derive from them. The Culture of Crime is hence about the most common and least studies staple of news. Its prominence dates at least to the 1830s, when the urban penny press employed violence, sex, and scandal to build dizzying high levels of circulation and begin the modern age of mass media. In its coverage of crime, in particular, the popular press represented a new kind of journalism, if not a new definition of news, that made available for public consumption whole areas of social and private life that the mercantile, elite, and political press earlier ignored. This legacy has continued unabated for 150 years. The book explores new wrinkles in the study of crime and as a mass cultural activity—from exploring the private lives of public officials to dangers posed by constraints to a free press. The volume is prepared with the rigor of a scholarly brief but also the excitement of actual crime stories as such. Throughout, the reader is reminded that crime stories are both news and drama, and to ignore either is to diminish the other. The work delves deeply into current problems without either sentimental or trivial pursuits. It will be a volume of great interest to people in communications research, the social sciences, criminologists, and not least, the broad public which must endure the punishment of crime and the thrill of the crime story alike.




Rise of the Warrior Cop


Book Description

This groundbreaking history of how American police forces have been militarized is now revised and updated. Newly added material brings the story through 2020, including analysis of the Ferguson protests, the Obama and Trump administrations, and the George Floyd protests. The last days of colonialism taught America’s revolutionaries that soldiers in the streets bring conflict and tyranny. As a result, our country has generally worked to keep the military out of law enforcement. But over the last two centuries, America’s cops have increasingly come to resemble ground troops. The consequences have been dire: the home is no longer a place of sanctuary, the Fourth Amendment has been gutted, and police today have been conditioned to see the citizens they serve as enemies. In Rise of the Warrior Cop, Balko shows how politicians’ ill-considered policies and relentless declarations of war against vague enemies like crime, drugs, and terror have blurred the distinction between cop and soldier. His fascinating, frightening narrative that spans from America’s earliest days through today shows how a creeping battlefield mentality has isolated and alienated American police officers and put them on a collision course with the values of a free society.




A History of American Magazines, Volume II: 1850-1865


Book Description

The first volume of this work, covering the period from 1741-1850, was issued in 1931 by another publisher, and is reissued now without change, under our imprint. The second volume covers the period from 1850 to 1865; the third volume, the period from 1865 to 1885. For each chronological period, Mr. Mott has provided a running history which notes the occurrence of the chief general magazines and the developments in the field of class periodicals, as well as publishing conditions during that period, the development of circulations, advertising, payments to contributors, reader attitudes, changing formats, styles and processes of illustration, and the like. Then in a supplement to that running history, he offers historical sketches of the chief magazines which flourished in the period. These sketches extend far beyond the chronological limitations of the period. The second and third volumes present, altogether, separate sketches of seventy-six magazines, including The North American Review, The Youth's Companion, The Liberator, The Independent, Harper's Monthly, Leslie's Weekly, Harper's Weekly, The Atlantic Monthly, St. Nicholas, and Puck. The whole is an unusual mirror of American civilization.




Punishment Without Crime


Book Description

A revelatory account of the misdemeanor machine that unjustly brands millions of Americans as criminals. Punishment Without Crime offers an urgent new interpretation of inequality and injustice in America by examining the paradigmatic American offense: the lowly misdemeanor. Based on extensive original research, legal scholar Alexandra Natapoff reveals the inner workings of a massive petty offense system that produces over 13 million cases each year. People arrested for minor crimes are swept through courts where defendants often lack lawyers, judges process cases in mere minutes, and nearly everyone pleads guilty. This misdemeanor machine starts punishing people long before they are convicted; it punishes the innocent; and it punishes conduct that never should have been a crime. As a result, vast numbers of Americans -- most of them poor and people of color -- are stigmatized as criminals, impoverished through fines and fees, and stripped of drivers' licenses, jobs, and housing. For too long, misdemeanors have been ignored. But they are crucial to understanding our punitive criminal system and our widening economic and racial divides. A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2018




Reports


Book Description




The Banana Police


Book Description

Deep in the jungle is a sweet little town where people happily co-exist with elephants, until the townspeople become increasingly annoyed with their lovable, lumpy, neighbors. After all, they snore loudly, hog the best seats at the movies, and block all the aisles in the supermarket. Who needs that? When the Mayor calls on the Elephant Police to devise a clever scheme to get the elephants to leave, the town ends up buried in all the extra bananas the beasts usually eat. The Mayor then calls on the Banana Police to deal with the bananas, but it's the townspeople themselves who (burp ) finally get rid of them. Everyone ends up learning, immediately, if not sooner, as the Mayor is known to say, just how vital those pesky pachyderms really are. The unspoken message is about the value of peaceful co-existence and cooperation between inherently different groups.