Customer Reviews

Violent Land: Single Men and Social Disorder from the Frontier to the Inner City

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Why has America been so violent? Courtwright's thesis is straightforward : an abundance of young, poorly socialized males with easy access to liquor and guns and poor access to marriagable females. The author's research is solidly historical and scientific (he mines demographic, criminological, and anthropological sources.) While some of his premises are controversial (evolutionary behaviorism and Moynihan's views on the breakdown of society in the black inner cities), he recognizes the interplay between genetics and culture, and points out that societies can become less violent over time given the right circumstances. The author also points out where "conservatives" and "liberals" disagree over root causes and possible solutions. Highly recommended for those interested in American social history, criminology, and urban issues.

All history books should be written as this one is--it's engaging and lively in its premise that when large groups of (especially) young, unattached men get together...violence ensues, and that this was/is the social dynamic responsible for, among other things, the WILD West.

You may or may not agree with these ideas, but it should make you think of history in a new way. History need not be understood as simply the action-reaction paradigm we're all taught in our (boring) high school classes, but instead as the result of subtle interacting factors: biology, culture, language, and who-all knows what.

I strongly recommend this book, particularly if you think you "hate" history

This is a Very Important book -- well written and researched -- that goes a very long way towards explaining honestly why violence, racism and religious hypocrisy are as common to American culture as motherhood and apple pie.

It has a great deal to do with the geography of gender. That is with the fact that up until the end of WW-II, the US was one of only a handful of countries that throughout its history has had a gender ratio that disproportionately favored men. For most of U.S. history the nation was an immigrant country with an excess of physically active, testosterone-laden, gun toting, alcohol-plied men running about the country with a shortage of women and an equal shortage of "home training." And just as such a population proved a good thing for economic development, it proved a disastrous formula for developing a civilized non-violent, religious oriented nation.

After all, it was the need for economic development that was the primary reason for so much single male labor -- in the form of slavery, convicts, stevedores, ironworkers, hired field hands, construction workers and builders, soldiers both of the military, as well as soldiers of fortune, and gold miners and all manner of fortune seekers, etc. most of whom were young, single and mostly cantankerous males.

In early America generally, but the American frontier in particular, there was always a shortage of women and a surfeit of violent uncivilized, mostly racist white men. All possible avenues to address this problem proved ineffectual.

One, exercised by the French and Spanish soldiers of fortune, but not by racist American white men, was intermarriage with Native American women. With few exceptions, the white men who dominated the frontier, for racial reasons alone, not only preferred not to intermarry, but jealously guarded their own prerogative of keeping the few available white women all to themselves.

Another solution was to try to civilize these men through marriage and family formation. But since there was already a shortage of women, this worked only in areas already civilized, and where the gender ratio favored women. The final solution was religion, which failed for the same reason -- as again it usually only attracted those men and women who were already settled and civilized.

Thus for most of its history, America has had to face the problem of having an excess of single, violent, racist, gun-toting, alcoholic men with few effective avenues of civilizing them.

The modern continuation of this historical process is today's Black urban ghetto, where the same kind of un-civility that beset the American frontier, now has a firm grip on most American inner cities.

It makes one wonder why we are spending $100+ billion a year to civilize and democratize Iraq, which was a cultured and civilized society long before the U.S. was even thought of, rather than spending these sums in our inner cities to help civilize and democratize our own country?

A devastatingly clear and rare presentation of the honest facts of American history. Ten stars

This, like All God's Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence, helps explain a sociological phenomenon from an historical perspective. Along with The Seduction of Crime, senseless violence finally makes sense :}!

All men are thoroughly reprehensible monsters, criminal psychopaths until they are rehabilitated by the love of a good woman. The author doesn't believe that gay people exist, but if you could convince him, he would no doubt suggest that gay men should be corralled into shot-gun marriages so they could be rehabiliated by the love of a good woman too.

I can see the new constitutional amendment: all men, gay or straight, must get married to women by age 18, or go to prison. Or does the author believe that all men who are unmarried and over age 18 already are in prison?