The emergence of the social sciences, established in the mid to late nineteenth-century, had a substantial bearing on how researchers, academics, and eventually the general public thought about criminal behavior. Using Modernism as a lens, Stephen Brauer, examines how these disciplines shaped Americans’ understanding of criminality in the twentieth-century and how it provides a new way to think about culture, social norms, and ultimately, laws. In theory, laws act as articulations and codifications of a community’s beliefs, values, and principles. By breaking laws, criminals help us reinforce social norms by providing the opportunity to affirm what is believed to be right. By operating outside the bounds of acceptable behavior, the criminal serves as a useful figure to understand what is at stake in the culture, what the central issues of that culture might be, and what the fears and anxieties are. Criminality serves as a lens through which we can read ourselves and how the criminal operates as a cultural figure signifies the things we are negotiating in our lives and in our communities. Brauer focuses on two main concepts, central to the very concept of Modernism, to explore criminality: contingency, the idea that the individual might not be in control of their own deviance, and agency, the notion that the criminal makes a conscious choice to use crime as a means of economic success. The figure of the criminal is a powerful one and is key to exploring American twentieth-century culture. This book would be of interest to students and scholars in criminology, sociology, cultural studies, literary studies, history, and many others.

The authors have had two major purposes, in writing this brief volume. They have, in the first place, attempted to formulate material for a college course which should give in vigorous, very direct, practical fashion acquaintance with the major problems of mental health, and mental disease and deficiency. The writers have attempted not only to outline the primarily medical and psychiatric features of these problems of mental health, but also to show their even more fundamental relations to education, and to give some realization of the frequency with which matters involving mental abnormality appear in the affairs of everyday business and professional life. The writers have, in the second place, attempted a treatment which should be of definite practical value to those interested in various special fields of work in which problems of personality and adjustment are frequently met; they have had in mind particularly social service, personnel management, work with delinquents, and those most important functionings of the school and college which involve the student's emotional and characterological development and his educational, vocational, and recreational guidance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2005 APA, all rights reserved).