Oral Presentations and Performances: Session III
Project Type
Presentation
Faculty Mentor’s Full Name
Dr. Madison Gerdes
Faculty Mentor’s Department
Department of Sociology and Criminology
Abstract / Artist's Statement
Despite the salience of political assassinations in American history and culture, there isn’t a database that focuses on them, and those that do exist often lack detail and focus on broad trends over locations and time. This absence of centralized information has led to the creation of a database on these rare events, which contains political assassinations between 1777 and 2026. The cases rely heavily on a variety of open-source data, which includes books, newspapers, databases, and other relevant information and documents. This presentation will be an exploratory descriptive analysis that emphasizes a general overview of contextual trends in these incidents over 250 years of the existence of the American project. Additionally, particular attention will be focused on the highest frequencies of samples in the database. These peaks will be explored as a historical analysis that will explain the relationship of assassinations to the past conditions of the United States. This research underscores the utility of open source data and archive data collection methods in sociology. In addition, it furthers our understanding of political assassinations as contextualized social phenomena.
Category
Social Sciences
250 Years of Political Assassinations: An Exploratory Look Into Attacks on Political Figures in the United States
UC 333
Despite the salience of political assassinations in American history and culture, there isn’t a database that focuses on them, and those that do exist often lack detail and focus on broad trends over locations and time. This absence of centralized information has led to the creation of a database on these rare events, which contains political assassinations between 1777 and 2026. The cases rely heavily on a variety of open-source data, which includes books, newspapers, databases, and other relevant information and documents. This presentation will be an exploratory descriptive analysis that emphasizes a general overview of contextual trends in these incidents over 250 years of the existence of the American project. Additionally, particular attention will be focused on the highest frequencies of samples in the database. These peaks will be explored as a historical analysis that will explain the relationship of assassinations to the past conditions of the United States. This research underscores the utility of open source data and archive data collection methods in sociology. In addition, it furthers our understanding of political assassinations as contextualized social phenomena.