Homicide, North and South

Being a Comparative View of Crime against the Person in Several Parts of the United States

H. V. Redfield
Introduction by Douglas Eckberg

While H. V. Redfield was not the first person to note the elevated amount of interpersonal violence in Southern and border states, Homicide, North and South was the first book to investigate regional differences in murder systematically, by discussing counts and rates from different states and the two major regions side by side. It appears to be the first book to draw on newspaper clippings to document homicide rates quantitatively, and it certainly was the first work to do so in a systematic, comparative fashion.

Redfield used multiple data sources, both news clippings and (from those states that collected and published them) mortality or criminal statistics. Where possible, he compared such records with one another to establish their joint reliability.

H. V. Redfield was a late nineteenth-century journalist, and Washington bureau chief for the Cincinnati Commercial. In 1880 he published Homicide, North and South which Douglas Eckberg calls “the nineteenth-century exemplar of the social scientific and historical study of violence.” Douglas Eckberg is a professor and chair of the sociology department at Winthrop University. His introduction highlights the innovations of Redfield’s work and argues for its importance to today’s scholars of crime, violence, and Southern history.