Executing Democracy
Volume Two: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1835-1843
1st Edition
Published on 1. November 2012
368 pages
978-1-60917-345-6 (ISBN)
Description
This eye-opening and well-researched companion to the first volume of Executing Democracy enters the death-penalty discussion during the debates of 1835 and 1843, when pro-death penalty Calvinist minister George Barrell Cheever faced off against abolitionist magazine editor John O'Sullivan. In contrast to the macro-historical overview presented in volume 1, volume 2 provides micro-historical case studies, using these debates as springboards into the discussion of the death penalty in America at large. Incorporating a wide range of sources, including political poems, newspaper editorials, and warring manifestos, this second volume highlights a variety of perspectives, thus demonstrating the centrality of public debates about crime, violence, and punishment to the history of American democracy. Hartnett's insightful assessment bears witness to a complex national discussion about the political, metaphysical, and cultural significance of the death penalty.
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Stephen J. Hartnett
Executing Democracy
Volume Two: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1835-1843
Book
11/2012
Michigan State University Press
€72.50
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Content
- Intro
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Preface: "What Follies and Monstrous Barbarities"
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter One. The Second Great Awakening and the "Grotesque Sublime" of Antebellum America
- Chapter Two. O'Sullivan and Cheever's Death Penalty Debate, 1835-1842, and "The Highest Interests of Humanity"
- Chapter Three. O'Sullivan and Cheever's Death Penalty Debate of 1843 and "The Great Merciless Machine of Modernity"
- Conclusion. Capital Punishment and the Dilemmas of Antebellum Modernity
- Appendix. The Liberator Attacks the Death Penalty, 1842-1843
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
