The death penalty : an American history / Stuart Banner.
2002
HV8699.U5 B367 2002 (Mapit)
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Details
Title
The death penalty : an American history / Stuart Banner.
Author
Banner, Stuart, 1963-
ISBN
0674010833 (pbk.)
0674007514
0674007514
Imprint
Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2002.
Language
English
Description
385 p., [8] p. of plates : ill. ; 24 cm.
Call Number
HV8699.U5 B367 2002
Dewey Decimal Classification
364.66/0973
Summary
A comprehensive account of the death penalty in the United States. Stuart Banner tells the story of dramatic changes, over four centuries, in the ways capital punishment has been administered and experienced. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, death was the standard penalty for a laundry list of crimes--from adultery to murder, from arson to horse- theft. Hangings were public events, staged before enormous audiences, attended by women and men, young and old, black and white. Early on, the gruesome spectacle was an explicitly religious event--replete with sermons, confessions, and last-minute penitence--to promote the salvation of both the condemned person and the spectators. Through the nineteenth century, in response to changing mores, execution became increasingly secular and private. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as execution has become a quiet, sanitary, technological procedure, the death penalty is as divisive as ever. Re-creating what it was like to be the condemned prisoner, the executioner, and the eyewitness, Banner moves beyond the debates to give us an understanding of America's ultimate punishment.
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
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Table of Contents
1. Terror, blood, and repentance
2. Hanging day
3. Degrees of death
4. The origins of opposition
5. Northern reform, southern retention
6. Into the jail yard
7. Technological cures
8. Decline
9. To the Supreme Court
10. Resurrection.
2. Hanging day
3. Degrees of death
4. The origins of opposition
5. Northern reform, southern retention
6. Into the jail yard
7. Technological cures
8. Decline
9. To the Supreme Court
10. Resurrection.