Historical Methods in Criminology

Abstract

The history of historical methods in criminology reveals a variety of possibilities. Before the 1970s, legal history represented historical research in criminology, although it had more to do with the development of legal doctrine than the study of crime and criminal justice. In the 1970s, the new social history emphasized alternatives to traditional archival research, including oral history, material culture studies, and statistical analyses. Oral history and material culture methods have been used for some historical studies in criminology but are less common than statistical analyses of time-series data. Historians and criminologists have produced innovations in modeling long-term crime trends. The cultural turn of the 1980s brought “histories of the present” and expanded the range of sources beyond legal documents and crime statistics to include a wider range of texts, including newspapers and novels. The digital revolution of the 1990s, as well as the construction of digital archives, has enabled research completely online and made sources for transnational history accessible. Within the past decade, criminologists and historians have started to think about historical criminology, a method that bridges history and criminology, and is well positioned to pursue several projects, including plural time, memory, and microhistory. The choice of historical method depends in part on whether “history from below” is important, as envisioned decades ago, when the new social history began to influence historical research in criminology.