This, the nineteenth volume of Criminal Justice History, features seven original essays on the history of violent crimes and punishments in North America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including a major bibliography on capital punishment and the death penalty in the United States.

The volume also contains a long book review essay on eleven books dealing with aspects of global terrorism, and reviews of eleven individual major works on the history and ideology of cirme and criminal justice that have appeared from the end of the 1990s. The introduction outlines the issues and themes that are contained in the essays and reviews. As in the earlier volumes in this series, a comprehensive index identifies all subjects, names, and places in the volume.