Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, Western societies abandoned public executions in favor of private punishments, primarily confinement in penitentiaries and private executions. The transition, guided by a reconceptualization of the causes of crime, the nature of authority, and the purposes of punishment, embodied the triumph of new sensibilities and the reconstitution of cultural values throughout the Western world. This study examines the conflict over capital punishment in the United States and the way it transformed American culture between the Revolution and the Civil War. Relating the gradual shift in rituals of punishment and attitudes toward discipline to the emergence of a middle class culture that valued internal restraints and private punishments, Masur traces the changing configuration of American criminal justice. He examines the design of execution day in the Revolutionary era as a spectacle of civil and religious order, the origins of organized opposition to the death penalty and the invention of the penitentiary, the creation of private executions, reform organizations' commitment to social activism, and the competing visions of humanity and society lodged at the core of the debate over capital punishment. A fascinating and thoughtful look at a topic that remains of burning interest today, Rites of Execution will attract a wide range of scholarly and general readers.

This study examines the conflict over capital punishment and the transformation of American culture between the Revolution and the Civil War.

How does the way we think and feel about the world around us affect the existence and administration of the death penalty? What role does capital punishment play in defining our political and cultural identity? In this volume the authors argue that in order to understand the death penalty we need to know more about the “cultural lives”—past and present—of the state’s ultimate sanction.

It has long been acknowledged that the death penalty in the United States of America has been shaped by the country’s history of slavery and racial violence, but this book considers the lesser-explored relationship between the two practices’ respective abolitionist movements. The book explains how the historical and conceptual links between slavery and capital punishment have both helped and hindered efforts to end capital punishment. The comparative study also sheds light on the nature of such efforts, and offers lessons for how death penalty abolitionism should proceed in future. Using the history of slavery and abolition, it is argued that anti-death penalty efforts should be premised on the ideologies of the radical slavery abolitionists.

Capital punishment for murder was abolished in Britain in 1965. At this time, the way people in Britain perceived and understood the death penalty had changed – it was an issue that had become increasingly controversial, high-profile and fraught with emotion. In order to understand why this was, it is necessary to examine how ordinary people learned about and experienced capital punishment. Drawing on primary research, this book explores the cultural life of the death penalty in Britain in the twentieth century, including an exploration of the role of the popular press and a discussion of portrayals of the death penalty in plays, novels and films. Popular protest against capital punishment and public responses to and understandings of capital cases are also discussed, particularly in relation to conceptualisations of justice. Miscarriages of justice were significant to capital punishment’s increasingly fraught nature in the mid twentieth-century and the book analyses the unsettling power of two such high profile miscarriages of justice. The final chapters consider the continuing relevance of capital punishment in Britain after abolition, including its symbolism and how people negotiate memories of the death penalty. Capital Punishment in Twentieth-Century Britain is groundbreaking in its attention to the death penalty and the effect it had on everyday life and it is the only text on this era to place public and popular discourses about, and reactions to, capital punishment at the centre of the analysis. Interdisciplinary in focus and methodology, it will appeal to historians, criminologists, sociologists and socio-legal scholars.

Examines both the legal and illegal uses of the death penalty in American history.

This volume provides analyses of a range of subjects and issues in the death penalty debate, from medicine to the media. The essays address in particular the personal complexities of those involved, a fundamental part of the subject usually overridden by the theoretical and legal aspects of the debate. The unique personal vantage offered by this volume makes it essential reading for anyone interested in going beyond the removed theoretical understanding of the death penalty, to better comprehending its fundamental humanity. Additionally, the international range of the analysis, enabling disaggregation of country specific motivations, ensures the complexities of the death penalty are also considered from a global perspective.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of capital punishment in the Australian colonies for the very first time. The author illuminates all aspects of the penalty, from shortcomings in execution technique, to the behaviour of the dying criminal, and the antics of the scaffold crowd. Mercy rates, execution numbers, and capital crimes are explored alongside the transition from public to private executions and the push to abolish the death penalty completely. Notions of culture and communication freely pollinate within a conceptual framework of penal change that explains the many transformations the death penalty underwent. A vast array of sources are assembled into one compelling argument that shows how the ‘lesson’ of the gallows was to be safeguarded, refined, and improved at all costs. This concise and engaging work will be a lasting resource for students, scholars, and general readers who want an in-depth understanding of a long feared punishment. Dr. Steven Anderson is a Visiting Research Fellow in the History Department at The University of Adelaide, Australia. His academic research explores the role of capital punishment in the Australian colonies by situating developments in these jurisdictions within global contexts and conceptual debates.

This book details how capital punishment violates universal human rights and traces the evolution of the world's understanding of torture.

A comprehensive history of the death penalty in the West that provides more material on capital punishment in Western Christian history than is available in any other work in English.