Acclaimed author and professor Randolph Roth explored the much-debated topic of homicide in America in front of a crowd of over 70 students and faculty members yesterday in Baker Center Theatre.
As part of the final installation of a lecture series sponsored by the George Washington Forum, Roth, a history professor from Ohio State University, was invited to share his works.
Homicide is a very dangerous thing and we have a problem with it compared to the rest of the world
Roth said, adding that much more money is spent on trying to cure diseases that affect one out of thousands while many more people are affected by homicide.
One in every 460 white females will be murdered; one out of 160 white males ... one out of every 112 non white females and one out of every 27 non-white males (will be murdered) he said.
Reasons for the increase in murder rates in the U.S. include the people's attitude to their government and their attitudes towards members of their own community, he said.
Roth's most recent book, Child Murder in America, features the controversial topic of child homicide from the medieval times to the present.
He has a brilliant new book on American homicide said Robert Ingram, the director of the George Washington Forum. It builds on the conference we had last month on violence and the American Revolution. ... It just seemed like a natural follow up.
Roth has also authored a book called American Homicide, which explores the patterns of homicide in the United States.
(My colleagues and I) have been working and collecting data
Roth said. (And) we started to see patterns and the key is
once we started to look at hundreds of years of data and watched the homicide rate go up and down
we started to see these patterns.
Periods of depression, he added, have lower homicide rates than periods of economic growth.
In addition to the lecture, Roth visited a history class to give the students a more in-depth look at his work, Ingram said.
He is just not here to give a lecture
he added. (Yesterday) afternoon
he met for an hour with a U.S. history class and talked to the students in a smaller kind of break out group.
Much of the money for the George Washington Forum is funded by grants from the 1804 Fund at OU as well as from the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America's Founding Principles and History.
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