Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on today's show is

Barry Litzer. He's a professor emeritus at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Barry is also the author,

most recently of the roots of violent crime in America, from the Gilded Age to the Great Depression,

which is published by LSU Press, University Press.

Barry, thanks very much for joining us and for continuing to write for City Journal.

We always welcome you and glad to have you on the show.

My pleasure, Brian. It's great to be with you.

Now, this new book is a kind of sequel to your previous volume,

which was called The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America, which was published by encounter

a few years ago, which covered the crime wave of the mid to late 20th century. And that was a very

comprehensive book, where you looked at a number of

possible drivers of crime, the economy, the state of the criminal justice system, and culture.

Your cultural argument in the book was sophisticated and nuanced, but in essence, you were arguing that the great migration was behind

much of the crime wave as an emphasis on conflict from southern culture set the stage for the

gang violence that was occurring in cities in the 70s and 80s. This new book goes back a bit further to the end of the 19th century and the beginning of

the 20th. If we could focus a bit on this cultural question, what are some of the lessons you gleaned

while writing this new volume? How did the cultural legacy of the 80s right up to the 30s from the

waves of migration and prohibition

to the Great Depression, World War I? How did these things affect crime rates? And how does what

happened then have implications for today's crime? I think it drew the cultural explanation into even sharper focus, Brian, because what I found was

when we looked at the homicide rates primarily and other violent crime rates of different groups

...