Au dix-huitième siècle, le journal était devenu le plus important des moyens de diffusion imprimée de l'information concernant le crime et des enquêtes criminelles. Donnant à connaître des milliers de crimes et d'actions en justice, la presse dépassait de loin tout ce qu'à l'époque d'autres sources imprimées pouvaient apporter. Principal canal d'accès écrit aux circonstances des actions criminelles et à l'information en général à ce sujet, il n'est guère douteux que les journaux aient exercé une influence sur la façon dont leurs lecteurs allaient percevoir crime et justice et sur leurs attitudes à cet égard. Dans cet article, l'auteur procède à une analyse quantitative et qualitative de la rubrique criminelle d'un journal de province, The Kentish Post, or Canterbury Newsletter. L'étude révèle que ce journal s'est construit autour d'un schéma éditorial faisant du crime un des thèmes les plus importants à traiter. Cependant les rédacteurs du journal avaient à élaborer un texte selon la norme, alors qu'ils devaient traiter un nombre d'affaires criminelles sans commune mesure avec ce qui avait précédé. Cette nécessité éditoriale a eu pour résultat un discours sur la nature, les causes et les conséquences du crime très différent de celui que tenaient les pamphlétaires – le pamphlet ayant été, jusqu'à l'apparition des journaux, le lieu privilégié, plus familier aux historiens, de ce qui s'écrivait sur le crime.

One of the most intriguing and challenging problems facing historians of crime and the law is determining what were popular perceptions of criminal behaviour and criminal justice. Each of the articles in this special issue tackles this question by examining the content of British and colonial newspapers that were printed in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The choice of this period is significant both for the history of the press, and for that of criminal justice. It was during the eighteenth century that the newspaper became the dominant form of print culture, with readers enjoying an increasing choice of papers that were printed both in London and in the provinces. As literacy rates improved, and because newspaper stories could be read aloud, the audience for newspapers continued to expand. At the same time, the British state attempted new ways of administering criminal justice. The multiplication of the number of offences that carried the death penalty meant that the criminal code gained notoriety as the ‘Bloody Code’, while the Transportation Act of 1718, covering England and Wales, authorized the deportation of English and Welsh criminals to the American colonies. By the end of the eighteenth century London magistrates were experimenting with new methods of urban policing, as fears mounted about how the growing population could be both controlled and protected from crime. Newspapers reported, reflected upon and sometimes debated each of these developments, yet remarkably, it is not until now that historians of crime have analysed in any detail what the content of these newspapers can reveal about contemporary attitudes towards crime and justice.

In the eighteenth century the newspaper became the most important source for the printed dissemination of criminological stories and information. In bringing together thousands of narratives about crime and justice it far outstripped any other printed source of the period. As the primary literary means of accessing stories and information about crime, it is likely that newspapers influenced their readers' perceptions of and attitudes towards crime and the justice system. This article offers a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the crime content of one provincial newspaper, The Kentish Post, or Canterbury Newsletter. The study reveals the newspaper to have been constructed to a template, which privileged crime as one of its most important subjects. However, the editorial imperatives of compiling a regular text with an unprecedented number of stories resulted in a discourse of the nature, causes and consequences of crime very different to that expounded in the pamphlet literature, which had been the mainstay of printed discourses about crime before the arrival of newspapers and with which historians are more familiar.

Stories of transported criminals were exchanged in the print culture of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic, creating images of the incorrigibility of transported criminals and of the failures of transportation, with many either re-offending in America or returning to do so in England. This discourse also framed images that each side of the Atlantic had of the other. The British learnt that the plantations were a place of slavery, the Americans that the British viewed them as a ‘race of convicts’. This process, involving many layers of discourse in the criminal Atlantic, formed one of the earliest examples of international debates on crime and national identity.

As other sources of printed information about crime, such as the Ordinary's Accounts of the lives of executed criminals, lost their audience in the final third of the eighteenth century, newspapers came increasingly to dominate printed discussions of crime. However, no substantial study of the overall nature of newspaper reporting on crime and criminal justice issues has yet been undertaken. By focusing on the London press from the 1780s to the early years of the nineteenth century, this study aims to address a range of questions about the structure of crime and justice reporting, about the selectivity of law and order news and about the types of narratives and discursive structures that can be found at different periods. In particular it highlights the ways in which the multi-vocal, sporadic, brief and sometimes chaotic styles of crime reporting in newspapers created a kaleidoscope of different and often contradictory messages about such issues as the prevalence of violent crime, the effectiveness of policing and penal institutions and the quality of justice meted out by the courts. The printed word had a much less integrative role in relation to law and order issues than historians have sometimes suggested.

This article represents an exercise in microhistory applied to early modern London. Deploying prosopographical methods, it reconstructs the life history of one John Bedford (1601–1667) from his birth in Huntingdon to his death in the West End of London. Much of his adult life was spent in the London parish of St Dionis Backchurch, with an interlude in the Irish town of Londonderry. Bedford fled from Ulster at the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion in 1641. His unusually detailed will provides the bedrock of this narrative, and his reconstructed life sheds important light on ties between London and Ulster, on debt and credit relations and on the methodological strengths and limitations of community studies that focus on a specific place.

Focusing upon the interaction between ethnic political elites in Austin, Texas, during the early twentieth century, this study examines (1) the impact of migration upon the dominant white elite's attitudes towards and dealings with the city's subordinate nonwhite ethnies, and (2) the agendas adopted by local African-American and ethnic-Mexican leaders. The article explains why in their efforts to improve conditions for their respective ethnic communities, the African-American and ethnic-Mexican leaderships pursued very different strategies from each other – the former concentrating upon the attainment of more universalist goals, the latter on more multiculturalist ones – and evaluates the effectiveness of these contrasting policies.