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.
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.
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.
William Dorsey's Philadelphia and Ours: On the Past and Future of the Black City in America, (Oxford University Press, 1991) showed how this effect blighted a promising post-Civil War Golden Age in what was then the biggest and best-educated African American community in the North.
A small college, Haverford allowed him to participate in intramural athletics and theater, and enabled him to explore courses beyond American History in the humanities, touching e.g. on The Bible, Shakespeare, and Freud.