Roger Lane
American historian
Roger Lane (born January 17, 1934) is an American historian and professor emeritus at Haverford College.
Biography
Lane was born on January 17, 1934, to Eileen O'Connor and Alfred Baker Lewis, who gave him an invented surname before marrying in 1940. Raised in New England, he graduated from Yale (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) in 1955. At Columbia during 1955-6 he took a graduate history seminar with Richard Hofstader, then spent a year teaching and coaching athletics at Brunswick School in Connecticut. From there he earned a PhD at Harvard, as a student of the pioneering social historian Oscar Handlin, before accepting a position at Haverford in 1963.
His study of Policing the City: Boston, 1822-1885 ( Harvard University Press, 1967), was the first on the origins of urban police in America. A 1968 article in the Journal of Social History, "Urbanization and Criminal Violence in the 19th Century", challenged the then-conventional wisdom that crime naturally increases as cities grow. This earned an appointment to The President's Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, which reprinted it. Its depiction of the regimentation of life under the Industrial Revolution won the attention of Theodore Kaczynski, the infamous "Unabomber", who quoted it extensively in his 1995 manifesto, giving Lane a small role in his identification and capture.
Violent Death in the City: Suicide, Accident and Murder in 19th Century Philadelphia, (Harvard University Press, 1979), showed how the behavioral demands of school, office, and factory decreased the external manifestations of aggression, as murder, while increasing the internal, as suicide.
The public source identifies “Roger Lane” as american historian. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Roger, Lane and American.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7358506. VIAF identifies the subject as 70203966. The Library of Congress control number is n79055698. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1934, 1940, 1955 and 1963.
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This entry incorporates text from “Roger Lane” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.