Criminal justice records provide the historian with a wealth of data on social deviance, and on the role of the judiciary in defining and controlling it. They can as well comment on the most invisible group for the social historian: the “innocent bystanders,” the respectable folk who distinguish themselves neither by their power and influence nor by their deviance. This essay illustrates the value of one kind of judicial data, local criminal investigations in Brazil, to provide information on the working citizens of a community. Changes in the characteristics of that population may be indicative of wider social stress in the Brazilian Independence period.
