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Violent Land: Single Men and Social Disorder from the Frontier to the Inner City. By David T. Courtwright. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. xiv, 357 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0674-27870-4.)
This is an ambitious book with an admirably explicit argument about the root causes of the American proclivity to violence. While subsidiary factors play a role, racism among them, the basic issue has always been gender imbalance, particularly in periods of disproportionate youth. Regions and times that suffered an excess of single males were the violent centers in United States history; other areas (colonial New England) and other periods (the familial 1940s and 1950s) were not distinctively rambunctious. Gender imbalance fed some of the other factors, such as a culture of honor and the fascination with guns, but it always lay at the root.
David T. Courtwright sparks his early treatment with interdisciplinary material on male aggression patterns. He concludes with a mixed set of recommendations: toward the encouragement of families, away from extensive imprisonment and other causally misguided approaches.
In between, he offers the unusually strong line of analysis...