The End of Public Execution

The End of Public Execution PDF Author: Michael Ayers Trotti
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469670429
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Before 1850, all legal executions in the South were performed before crowds that could number in the thousands; the last legal public execution was in 1936. This study focuses on the shift from public executions to ones behind barriers, situating that change within our understandings of lynching and competing visions of justice and religion. Intended to shame and intimidate, public executions after the Civil War had quite a different effect on southern Black communities. Crowds typically consisting of as many Black people as white behaved like congregations before a macabre pulpit, led in prayer and song by a Black minister on the scaffold. Black criminals often proclaimed their innocence and almost always their salvation. This turned the proceedings into public, mixed-race, and mixed-gender celebrations of Black religious authority and devotion. In response, southern states rewrote their laws to eliminate these crowds and this Black authority, ultimately turning to electrocutions in the bowels of state penitentiaries. As a wave of lynchings crested around the turn of the twentieth century, states transformed the ways that the South's white-dominated governments controlled legal capital punishment, making executions into private affairs witnessed only by white people.

The End of Public Execution

The End of Public Execution PDF Author: Michael Ayers Trotti
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469670429
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Before 1850, all legal executions in the South were performed before crowds that could number in the thousands; the last legal public execution was in 1936. This study focuses on the shift from public executions to ones behind barriers, situating that change within our understandings of lynching and competing visions of justice and religion. Intended to shame and intimidate, public executions after the Civil War had quite a different effect on southern Black communities. Crowds typically consisting of as many Black people as white behaved like congregations before a macabre pulpit, led in prayer and song by a Black minister on the scaffold. Black criminals often proclaimed their innocence and almost always their salvation. This turned the proceedings into public, mixed-race, and mixed-gender celebrations of Black religious authority and devotion. In response, southern states rewrote their laws to eliminate these crowds and this Black authority, ultimately turning to electrocutions in the bowels of state penitentiaries. As a wave of lynchings crested around the turn of the twentieth century, states transformed the ways that the South's white-dominated governments controlled legal capital punishment, making executions into private affairs witnessed only by white people.

The Last Public Execution in America

The Last Public Execution in America PDF Author: Perry Thomas Ryan
Publisher: Perry t Ryan
ISBN: 9780962550447
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
On August 14, 1936, Rainey Bethea was hanged in Owensboro, Kentucky, before a crowd of 20,000. The public outrage which followed resulted in the complete abolition of public executions in the United States. This site provides the complete text of the book, The Last Public Execution in America.

Executing Magic in the Modern Era

Executing Magic in the Modern Era PDF Author: Owen Davies
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319595199
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 122

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Book Description
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license This book explores the magical and medical history of executions from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century by looking at the afterlife potency of criminal corpses, the healing activities of the executioner, and the magic of the gallows site. The use of corpses in medicine and magic has been recorded back into antiquity. The lacerated bodies of Roman gladiators were used as a source of curative blood, for instance. In early modern Europe, a great trade opened up in ancient Egyptian mummies and the fat of executed criminals, plundered as medicinal cure-alls. However, this is the first book to consider the demand for the blood of the executed, the desire for human fat, the resort to the hanged man’s hand, and the trade in hanging rope in the modern era. It ends by look at the spiritual afterlife of dead criminals.

A History of Capital Punishment in the Australian Colonies, 1788 to 1900

A History of Capital Punishment in the Australian Colonies, 1788 to 1900 PDF Author: Steven Anderson
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030537676
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
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.

Comparative Capital Punishment

Comparative Capital Punishment PDF Author: Carol S. Steiker
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1786433257
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
Comparative Capital Punishment offers a set of in-depth, critical and comparative contributions addressing death practices around the world. Despite the dramatic decline of the death penalty in the last half of the twentieth century, capital punishment remains in force in a substantial number of countries around the globe. This research handbook explores both the forces behind the stunning recent rejection of the death penalty, as well as the changing shape of capital practices where it is retained. The expert contributors address the social, political, economic, and cultural influences on both retention and abolition of the death penalty and consider the distinctive possibilities and pathways to worldwide abolition.

Hiding the Guillotine

Hiding the Guillotine PDF Author: Emmanuel Taïeb
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150175095X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Hiding the Guillotine examines the question of state involvement in violence by tracing the evolution of public executions in France. Why did the state move executions from the bloody and public stage of the guillotine to behind prison doors? In a fascinating exploration of a grim subject, Emmanuel Taïeb exposes the rituals and theatrical form of the death penalty and tells us who watched, who participated in, and who criticized (and ultimately brought an end to) a spectacle that the state called "punishment." France's abolition of the death penalty in 1981 has long overshadowed its suppression of public executions over forty years earlier. Since the Revolution, executions attracted tens of thousands of curious onlookers. But, gradually, there was a shift in attitude and the public no longer saw this as a civilized pastime. Why? Combining material from legal archives, police files, an executioner's notebooks, newspaper clippings, and documents relating to 566 executions, Hiding the Guillotine answers this question. Taïeb demonstrates the ways in which the media was at the vanguard of putting an end to the publicity surrounding the death penalty. The press had ample reason to be critical: cities were increasingly being used for leisure activity and prisons for those accused of criminal activity. The agitation surrounding each execution, coupled with a growing identification with the condemned, would blur these boundaries. Ranked among the top hundred history books by the website, Café du Web Historizo, Hiding the Guillotine has much to impart to students of legal history, human rights, and criminology, as well as to American historians.

Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse

Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse PDF Author: Sarah Tarlow
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319779087
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
This open access book is the culmination of many years of research on what happened to the bodies of executed criminals in the past. Focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it looks at the consequences of the 1752 Murder Act. These criminal bodies had a crucial role in the history of medicine, and the history of crime, and great symbolic resonance in literature and popular culture. Starting with a consideration of the criminal corpse in the medieval and early modern periods, chapters go on to review the histories of criminal justice, of medical history and of gibbeting under the Murder Act, and ends with some discussion of the afterlives of the corpse, in literature, folklore and in contemporary medical ethics. Using sophisticated insights from cultural history, archaeology, literature, philosophy and ethics as well as medical and crime history, this book is a uniquely interdisciplinary take on a fascinating historical phenomenon.

Public Executions

Public Executions PDF Author: Nigel Cawthorne
Publisher: Arcturus Publishing
ISBN: 1848585128
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
'The sentence of this court is that you be taken from this place to whence you came, and from there to a place of lawful execution, there to be hanged by the neck till you be dead, and may the Lord have mercy on your soul' -Extract from judicial death sentence, England c.16th-20th century Societies throughout history have adopted many and varied methods of meting out the ultimate sanction of capital punishment to their more unruly members. Although a number of countries across the globe still execute their own citizens, on occasion in public, the modern world in general views execution with distaste, and public execution doubly so. Public Executions documents the phenomenon of state-sanctioned killing from the ancient world to modern times, and in doing so, shows that although we regard the ancient practices with horror, they would have been equally bemused by our modern scruples, and would have regarded execution behind closed doors as little short of murder. Public Executions is a gruesomely enthralling account of public executions down through the ages and from around the world.

Public Execution in England, 1573-1868: 1573-1674. v. 1. General introduction ; Introduction to Part I ; Public execution in England, 1573-1674. v. 2. Public execution in England, 1573-1674

Public Execution in England, 1573-1868: 1573-1674. v. 1. General introduction ; Introduction to Part I ; Public execution in England, 1573-1674. v. 2. Public execution in England, 1573-1674 PDF Author: Leigh Yetter
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Capital punishment
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
The execution narrative was a popular genre in early modern England. New printing processes fed a public fascination with sensational eyewitness accounts of executions and transcriptions of felon's scaffold speeches. This eight-volume facsimile edition, the first of its kind, draws together a representative selection of texts to show the evolution of the genre from the late sixteenth century to the end of public execution in England nearly 300 years later. Primary source materials include pamphlets, broadsides, scaffold speeches and newspaper reports. The stories are, at turns, tragic, brutal, pathetic, touching, pious and irreverent. They provide invaluable insights into contemporary ideas of justice and the efficacy of capital punishment. They are tangible remnants of the fragile and complex relationship between a range of oppositional influences: the powerful and the governed, church and state, the market and morality, the moral collective and the individual offender. Usually cheap, sometimes crude, and always produced for sale (and, ideally, for profit), these works also represent a vital component of England's developing print culture and the range of uses to which print media were put in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. The edition includes extensive editorial material with a general introduction, section introductions, headnotes, endnotes and a consolidated index in the final volume. It will appeal to those studying Social and Cultural History, History of Print, History of Government and History of Crime.

Public Executions

Public Executions PDF Author: Christopher S. Kudlac
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Capital punishment
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description