Race And Homicide In Nineteenth-Century California (Shepperson Series in Nevada History) - Hardcover

McKanna, Clare V.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0874175151 ISBN 13: 9780874175158

Publisher: University of Nevada Press, 2002

Synopsis

High murder rates have always been considered an indication of a society in turmoil, and nineteenth-century California was no exception. A rapidly growing population, booming mining camps, insufficient or nonexistent law-enforcement personnel, and many ethnic groups with differing attitudes toward law and personal honor created a situation in which violence was common and legal responses varied broadly. Clare V. McKanna Jr. has published widely on the history of criminal justice in the West. For Race and Homicide in Nineteenth-Century California, he studied coroners' inquest reports, court case files, prison registers, and other primary sources, as well as numerous printed sources, to analyze patterns of homicide and the vagaries of the state's embryonic justice system. The nature of crimes, he discovered, varied with the ethnicity of perpetrators and victims, as did trials and sentencing patterns. Marginalized individuals, like the state's diminishing Indians, fared worst, and Hispanics, whose traditional legal system differed in important ways from the imported practices of the new white majority, did little better. Homicide in the Chinese community was largely confined to fellow

About this title

About the Author:

Clare V. McKanna Jr. is the author of Homicide, Race, and Justice in the American West. His essays on ethnicity, violence, prison, and homicide have appeared in numerous academic journals including Western Historical Quarterly, Pacific Historical Review, American Indian Quarterly, The Journal of San Diego History, and Western Legal History. He is lecturer in departments of history and American Indian studies at San Diego State University.

Review:

"In providing a detailed account of how whites won the struggle for power in the courts, McKanna's work is significant." -- Jill Dupont, The Journal of San Diego History (September 2005)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0874175151
• ISBN 13: 9780874175158
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 168