Assaulting the Past : Violence and Civilization in Historical Context.

This book offers an important contribution to the comparative history of interpersonal violence since the early modern period, a subject of great contemporary and historical importance. Its overarching theme is Norbert Elias's theory of the civilizing process, and the chapters in the book recognise, as he did, that changes in human behaviour are related to transformations of both social and personality structures. Drawing on a vast range of archival and written records from five countries, th ...

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Includes bibliographical references and index.

Violence and the "civilizing process." Locating violence : the spatial production and construction of physical aggression / J. Carter Wood -- Cruel inflictions and the claims of humanity in early nineteenth-century England / Randall McGowen -- Blasphemy and the anti-civilizing process / David Nash -- The emergence and breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process / Steve Hall -- Violence and social order. Violence, social order, the state and the absence of "regulation" in working-class communities in eighteenth-century England / Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton -- Settling their differences : the nature of assault and its prosecution in the city of London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries / Drew Gray -- Violence and disorder, 1880-1914 : similar trends, similar offences and similar explanations? / Barry Godfrey and Graeme Dunstall -- Violence and gender. Earth women and eagle warriors : revealing Aztec gender roles through ritual violence / Caroline Dodds -- Spiralling out of control? : female violence in eighteenth-century London and Mexico / Jennine Hurl-Eamon and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera -- "The lady-killers" : homicidal women in early modern Britain / Anne-Marie Kilday -- Violence and the civilized society. "Do you want to pick a fight out of me, or what do you want?" : homicide and personal animosity in pre-famine and famine Ireland / Richard McMahon -- Insanity and the "civilizing process" : violence, the insane and asylums in the nineteenth century / Cathy Smith -- "A state of personal danger" : domestic violence in England, 1903-1922 / Gail Savage -- Serial homicide and "civilization" / Katherine D. Watson.

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