/lit/ - Literature

>>22044682
A hundred years ago was almost the Depression, the last time the US has widespread child malnutrition from hunger and a time where roving mobs of migrants beset areas as they fled the Dust Bowl famine. Homicide rates were far, far higher during Prohibition than today.

Murder rates being low is a relatively recent phenomena. Oxford in the 1340s had a homicide rate twice that of Baltimore's peak. The natural rate of homicide for humans living as hunter gatherers is around 2,000 per 100,000. The worst Latin American states are around 40-60 per 100,000. People from 100 years ago would thing today's cities are generally far less dangerous and cleaner. Before pollution control smog would be even worse than China today, buildings would be coated in coal dust.

Don't mistake a handful of stages photos of nice areas for the reality. People lived in hastily constructed shanty towns across the US that dwarf homeless encampments today. Not drug addicts and the mentally ill, but hard working farm families hit by the Dust Bowl or unemployed factory workers. When Central Park was created a giant shanty town had to be cleared out of it. Defecation was in pits dug outside tenements and when they filled people used alleys between tenements.