A. E. Winship and Arthur MacDonald. Introduction nad Review Questions, Graeme Newman.

Are people born to crime and poverty, or made by their surroundings? This volume brings together two influential American works from the turn of the twentieth century that tried to answer that question.

In Jukes–Edwards: A Study in Education and Heredity (1900), educator A. E. Winship sets the infamous “Jukes” family against the descendants of the great colonial theologian Jonathan Edwards. The Jukes were the subject of Richard Dugdale’s famous study of crime and pauperism. Edwards’s descendants included college presidents, judges, physicians, senators, and a vice-president of the United States. Winship’s vivid portraits, from Sarah Edwards’s household to the troubled brilliance of Aaron Burr, make a case for the combined power of inheritance, training, and education.

In A Plan for the Study of Man (1902), Arthur MacDonald of the U.S. Bureau of Education urges Congress to establish a national laboratory for the scientific study of “the criminal, pauper, and defective classes.” He wanted it to study ordinary people as well. His wide-ranging survey covers anthropometry, measurements of schoolchildren, instruments for gauging sensitivity to heat, touch, and pain, and hypnotism and suggestion. It also takes in the Mafia and the Camorra, alcoholism, moral education, prison reform, and a detailed case history of a young murderer. His original illustrations of laboratory instruments are reproduced.

The new introduction places both works in historical context. It traces their influence on the eugenics movement, the later criticism of their methods, and their surprising anticipation of modern child development and criminological research. Spelling and wording have been modernized throughout, tables have been summarized in prose, and review and discussion questions are included. The book will interest students and general readers in criminology, sociology, education, and the history of science.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. p.196.

Editor: Dennis Rodgers

Through biographical investigations of gang members' life histories, this open access book illustrates the range of causes, motivations, and consequences associated with being a gang member.

Gangs are one of a small number of truly global social phenomena, present across time and space all over the world. Partly as a result of this ubiquity, gangs are inherently revealing social institutions, and can be connected to a range of fundamental human activities, such as the exercise of power, capital accumulation, socialization, identity formation, territorialization, or the articulation of gender relations, amongst others.

At the same time, however, gangs are also frequently associated with an almost pathological form of violence, generally represented as engaging in senseless forms of brutality, and gangsters are popular
global scapegoats. Such representations make it all the more urgent to understand what it is that truly motivates individuals to become gang members, why they undergo particular trajectories, and what the
long-term consequences of gang membership might be.

Through a comparison of thirteen life histories of gang members from twelve different countries around the world, this book offers a nuanced and sensitive overview of the global gang experience. Life histories are ideal lenses through which to explore these issues due to their ability to simultaneously reflect both the uniqueness and the embedded complexity of gang lives, but also their capacity to offer fundamentally relatable portraits that elicit empathy and humanize individuals.