Mass Murder

The crime of mass murder is surrounded by myth, false assumptions, and misinformation. It is frequently sensationalized in the press, while the complex motivations of the perpetrator are ignored or soon forgotten. The mass murderer is rarely a crazed killer who lashes out against his victims in a mindless frenzy of violence. This book examines not only the crime of mass murder, but also the complex motivations of the mass murderer, presenting a completely new method of categorizing and analyzing the crime and its perpetrator. The evolving nature of the crime is examined in the context of actual case histories of mass murder in America. Kelleher's insights will be of interest to criminologists and anyone interested in the sociology of crime.

In this path-breaking work of intellectual and cultural history, Glass argues that the answers lie in the rise of a particular ethos of public health and sanitation that emerged from the German medical establishment and filtered down to the common people. Building his argument on a trove of documentary evidence, including the records of the German medical community and of other professional groups, he traces the development in the years following WWI of theories of racial hygiene that singled out the Jews as an infectious disease, and that determined them as "life unworthy of life" in the works of Nazi propagandists and German scientists.

this book attempts to make sense of the senseless. Its author considers cases of genocide past and present.

Focusing on the twentieth century, this collection of essays by leading international experts offers an up-to-date, comprehensive history and analysis of multiple cases of genocide and genocidal acts. The book contains studies of the Armenian genocide; the victims of Stalinist terror; the Holocaust; and Imperial Japan. Contributors explore colonialism and address the fate of the indigenous peoples in Africa, North America, and Australia. In addition, extensive coverage of the post-1945 period includes the atrocities in the former Yugoslavia, Bali, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Rwanda, East Timor, and Guatemala. Robert Gellately is Professor and Strassler Family Chair for the Study of Holocaust History at Clark University, where he teaches a variety of courses in modern German history, modern European history and the history of the Holocaust with a concentration on the study of Nazi Germany and the Gestapo. In Backing Hitler (Oxford, 2001), Gellately uses new evidence to demolish long-held beliefs about what ordinary Germans knew of the concentration camps. His internationally acclaimed book, The Gestapo and German Society (Oxford, 1990) challenges conventional concepts of the Gestapo and daily life in Nazi Germany. He has won numerous fellowships, and awards, most recently from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany. Ben Kiernan is A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History and Director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University and Convenor of the Yale East Timor Project. Kiernan is the author of The Pol Pot Regime (Yale, 1996), How Pol Pot Came to Power (Verso Books, 1985) and three other works and over a hundred scholarly articles on Southeast Asia and the history of genocide. Choice called him "the most knowledgeable observer of Cambodia anywhere in the Western world." Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge "indicted" and then "sentenced" him as an "arch war criminal." Kiernan is a member of the Editorial Boards of Human Rights Review, the Journal of Human Rights, and the Journal of Genocide Research. He is currently writing a global history of genocide since 1500.