This book is written in the form of stories that individually and collectively describe violence and violent crime in the U.S. in the twentieth century. Because violence means different things to different people, this book attempts to show students the many ways in which we as a society think about violence and how these perceptions have developed in our society during the twentieth century. Weaving a personal narrative style together with official statistics, media reports, research findings, and first-hand accounts, the author illustrates the U.S. experience and the social construction of various forms of violence.

Since the language of social constructionism is often difficult for students to understand, this book goes beyond simple explanations of how violence and violent crime are socially constructed. This book succeeds in making an abstract but important theory accessible to students by grounding these explanations in specific historical and biographical experiences of U.S. society.