In 1806 thousands descended on Lenox, Massachusetts, for the hanging of Ephraim Wheeler, condemned for the rape of his 13-year-old daughter, Betsy. Using the trial report to reconstruct the crime and drawing on Wheeler’s jailhouse autobiography to unravel his troubled family history, the authors illuminate a rarely seen slice of early America.
The Genealogy Annual is a comprehensive bibliography of the year's genealogies, handbooks, and source materials. It is divided into three main sections. FAMILY HISTORIES-cites American and international single and multifamily genealogies, listed alphabetically by major surnames included in each book. GUIDES AND HANDBOOKS-includes reference and how-to books for doing research on specific record groups or areas of the U.S. or the world. GENEALOGICAL SOURCES BY STATE-consists of entries for genealogical data, organized alphabetically by state and then by city or county. The Genealogy Annual, the core reference book of published local histories and genealogies, makes finding the latest information easy. Because the information is compiled annually, it is always up to date. No other book offers as many citations as The Genealogy Annual; all works are included. You can be assured that fees were not required to be listed.
Life imprisonment is a complex and drastic penal sanction. It gives the State the power to curtail the liberty of offenders for the rest of their lives. In many jurisdictions life imprisonment is the ultimate sanction for the most serious crimes. It is frequently touted as an alternative to the death penalty. At the same time, life imprisonment is often imposed as a preventive measure, where the offence alone does not justify using the ultimate sanction in the penal arsenal. The complexity of life imprisonment is frequently overlooked. Often it is assumed that it is not as drastic as it sounds, as it will not be enforced for the whole life of the offender. There may also be a reluctance to subject life imprisonment to close scrutiny, lest its perceived suitability as an alternative to the death penalty be undermined. This book tackles the complexity of life imprisonment head on by describing how various forms of it are imposed and implemented in the United States of America, in England and Wales and in Germany, as well as in the emerging international system of criminal justice. From this basis it examines the justifications advanced for life imprisonment and the modifications that have resulted in individual jurisdictions in response to criticisms of its imposition and implementation. At the same time, the book develops a more general critique of life imprisonment. It evaluates it against constitutional human rights standards that have been developed in many jurisdictions to judge the acceptability of punishment generally. It concludes that some current practices in both the imposition and implementation of life imprisonment clearly are fundamentally unacceptable, but that questions remain, even about carefully implemented life sentences imposed for the most serious crimes. The jurisprudential analysis provides the basis for a major re-evaluation of life imprisonment and raises doubts about the unquestioning acceptance of this ultimate penalty.
Crime, Policing and Punishment in England, 1660-1914 offers an overview of the changing nature of crime and its punishment from the Restoration to World War 1. It charts how prosecution and punishment have changed from the early modern to the modern period and reflects on how the changing nature of English society has affected these processes. By combining extensive primary material alongside a thorough analysis of historiography this text offers an invaluable resource to students and academics alike. The book is arranged in two sections: the first looks at the evolution and development of the criminal justice system and the emergence of the legal profession, and examines the media's relationship with crime. Section two examines key themes in the history of crime, covering the emergence of professional policing, the move from physical punishment to incarceration and the importance of gender and youth. Finally, the book draws together these themes and considers how the Criminal Justice System has developed to suit the changing nature of the British state.
In antebellum America, both North and South emerged as modernizing, capitalist societies. Work bells, clock towers, and personal timepieces increasingly instilled discipline on one’s day, which already was ordered by religious custom and nature’s rhythms. The Civil War changed that, argues Cheryl A. Wells. Overriding antebellum schedules, war played havoc with people’s perception and use of time. For those closest to the fighting, the war’s effect on time included disrupted patterns of sleep, extended hours of work, conflated hours of leisure, indefinite prison sentences, challenges to the gender order, and desecration of the Sabbath. Wells calls this phenomenon “battle time.” To create a modern war machine military officers tried to graft the antebellum authority of the clock onto the actual and mental terrain of the Civil War. However, as Wells’s coverage of the Manassas and Gettysburg battles shows, military engagements followed their own logic, often without regard for the discipline imposed by clocks. Wells also looks at how battle time’s effects spilled over into periods of inaction, and she covers not only the experiences of soldiers but also those of nurses, prisoners of war, slaves, and civilians. After the war, women returned, essentially, to an antebellum temporal world, says Wells. Elsewhere, however, postwar temporalities were complicated as freedmen and planters, and workers and industrialists renegotiated terms of labor within parameters set by the clock and nature. A crucial juncture on America’s path to an ordered relationship to time, the Civil War had an acute effect on the nation’s progress toward a modernity marked by multiple, interpenetrating times largely based on the clock.
From the Pentagon to the wedding chapel, there are few issues more controversial today than gay rights. As William Eskridge persuasively demonstrates in Dishonorable Passions, there is nothing new about this political and legal obsession. The American colonies and the early states prohibited sodomy as the crime against nature, but rarely punished such conduct if it took place behind closed doors. By the twentieth century, America’s emerging regulatory state targeted degenerates and (later) homosexuals. The witch hunts of the McCarthy era caught very few Communists but ruined the lives of thousands of homosexuals. The nation’s sexual revolution of the 1960s fueled a social movement of people seeking repeal of sodomy laws, but it was not until the Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) that private sex between consenting adults was decriminalized. With dramatic stories of both the hunted (Walt Whitman and Margaret Mead) and the hunters (Earl Warren and J. Edgar Hoover), Dishonorable Passions reveals how American sodomy laws affected the lives of both homosexual and heterosexual Americans. Certain to provoke heated debate, Dishonorable Passions is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of sexuality and its regulation in the United States
