Before the 1940s Puerto Rico was an obscure possession for most American social scientists, as indeed it was for most United States citizens. Conquered in the Spanish-American War, Puerto Rico was overshadowed in the American consciousness by its more tumultuous neighbor Cuba. To be sure, by the 1930s, there were sparks of interest among foundation staffs, New Dealers, and radicals in the plight of the Puerto Rican poor. Yet on the whole the island continued to merit only cursory attention.

The primary reasons for understanding homicide in the past are the same as for the present, and in fact most present studies use some comparisons over time. Because homicide varies across time and over political territories, we know that it is not an invariant human phenomenon. For social historians, homicide is also important because in both coroners and newspaper accounts we catch fascinating snatches of everyday life. Through its incidence and the records generated around the events we are able to explore otherwise hard-to-see aspects of our past.

The introduction of the Uniform Crime Reporting system (UCR) in 1930 remains one of the most important events in the history of criminal statistics in the United States. Based on local police reports, it is the oldest extant national crime data system in the United States, with the possible exception of prison statistics. It continues to be a vitally important data system because of its extensive use by scholars, social critics, governmental organizations and the media, and as such it has made a major contribution to our understanding of crime in the United States in the last half century. The UCR has also had its share of controversy, involving not only scientific issues of validity and reliability, but the possibility of covert agendas on the part of the police and the FBI to foster an image of effective law enforcement. Despite its importance and controversial nature there is no single objective and definitive written history documenting the beginnings of the UCR. That which exists tends to be brief and superficial, and at times even ideologically biased (Leonard 1954; Maltz 1977; Sherman et al. 1982; Thompson 1968; U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation 1940).

In the late nineteenth century, as today, Milan stood at the center of Italy's most advanced economic developments, and served in effect as the financial capital of the country. Well before industrialization had taken hold in most of the Italian peninsula, Milan's industry—tied to developments further north in Europe—was sprouting. Moreover, as the three articles that follow clearly show, Milan—rather than the Italian capital, Rome—was at the heart of many modern political developments in Italy.

Andrea Costa, a contemporary observer and sometime participant in Italian socialist politics, spoke in 1886 in defense of the Lombardy-based Partito operaio, whose leaders had been arrested and its newspaper muzzled. He offered a classic Marxist interpretation of the party's emergence as a “natural product of… our economic and social conditions … the concentration of the means of production in few hands, distancing the worker more and more from his tools … and likewise a product of our political conditions … electoral reform, by means of which the working class … can affirm itself as a class apart.” Further, this party had been founded in Milan, “where modern industry has penetrated more than elsewhere,” and closely following the expansion of the suffrage in 1881 (Italy 1886: 419).

The analysis here focuses on mobilization and identity among a significant section of the Milanese petite bourgeoisie, rather than on the formation of a single identity that encompassed all the members of the city's lower middle classes. One has to recognize that these intermediate strata possess many different and, at times, conflicting interests. Most recent historians prefer to use the term petite bourgeoisie to indicate individuals who control their own capital, as opposed to the “new” lower middle classes of salaried employees (Bechhofer 1976: 76–79; Crossick 1984: 6–10). Yet even this more strictly denned grouping of shopkeepers and master artisans embraces both the self-employed and small employers, manufacturers and retailers, and “skilled” and “unskilled” trades. One cannot portray these strata as a class in itself, let alone for itself.

In recent years Italian social historians have devoted increasing attention to the nature and morphology of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. Traditional historiography viewed the bourgeoisie as key par excellence to the political change played out between 1859 and 1871. It was seen, on the one hand, as integral to the formation of a liberal political regime based on a limited suffrage, and, on the other, as critical to the outcome of the peninsula's national unification of a dozen small states, most of which were previously governed by absolutist regimes.

At the very end of Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard the priests come and remove the relics preserved and protected by the Prince of Salina's aged daughters, virtually the last survivors of the family. Nothing is left of the fabled world of the Sicilian aristocrats. Even the material and symbolic artifacts of their eminence—the religious relics they guarded and the palace over which they presided—have turned into rubble or taken on the musty air of decay. The world of the Prince of Salina, a world of inherited wealth and power stretching back to the Norman conquests of the eleventh century, of aristocratic balls, of shimmering palaces in Palermo and vast estates in the interior—that world has come to an end.