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9780252038068 Academic Inspection Copy

The Rise of the Chicago Police Department

Class and Conflict, 1850-1894
  • ISBN-13: 9780252038068
  • Publisher: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
    Imprint: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
  • By Sam Mitrani
  • Price: AUD $113.00
  • Stock: 0 in stock
  • Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
  • Local release date: 13/02/2014
  • Format: Hardback 272 pages Weight: 0g
  • Categories: History of the Americas [HBJK]
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In this book, Sam Mitrani cogently examines the making of the police department in Chicago, which by the late 1800s had grown into the most violent, turbulent city in America. Chicago was roiling with political and economic conflict, much of it rooted in class tensions, and the city's lawmakers and business elite fostered the growth of a professional municipal police force to protect capitalism, its assets, and their own positions in society. Together with city policymakers, the business elite united behind an ideology of order that would simultaneously justify the police force's existence and dictate its functions.Tracing the Chicago police department's growth through events such as the 1855 Lager Beer riot, the Civil War, the May Day strikes, the 1877 railroad workers strike and riot, and the Haymarket violence in 1886, Mitrani demonstrates that this ideology of order both succeeded and failed in its aims. Recasting late nineteenth-century Chicago in terms of the struggle over order, this insightful history uncovers the modern police department's role in reconciling democracy with industrial capitalism.
"A valuable, well-informed examination of the formative period in the development of the American police."--The Journal of American History

"This excellent book leaves no doubt that in Chicago, 'a military-style police department' emerged not as a general manifestation of the modernization of urban services but 'to keep order in the face of the threats posed by a mobile class of wage workers.'"--The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
 
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