America's Death Penalty: Between Past and Present

by David Garland (Editor), Randall McGowen (Editor), Michael Meranze (Editor)

Overview

Over the past three decades, the United States has embraced the death penalty with tenacious enthusiasm. While most of those countries whose legal systems and cultures are normally compared to the United States have abolished capital punishment, the United States continues to employ this ultimate tool of punishment. The death penalty has achieved an unparalleled prominence in our public life and left an indelible imprint on our politics and culture. It has also provoked intense scholarly debate, much of it devoted to explaining the roots of American exceptionalism.
America’s Death Penalty takes a different approach to the issue by examining the historical and theoretical assumptions that have underpinned the discussion of capital punishment in the United States today. At various times the death penalty has been portrayed as an anachronism, an inheritance, or an innovation, with little reflection on the consequences that flow from the choice of words. This volume represents an effort to restore the sense of capital punishment as a question caught up in history. Edited by leading scholars of crime and justice, these original essays pursue different strategies for unsettling the usual terms of the debate. In particular, the authors use comparative and historical investigations of both Europe and America in order to cast fresh light on familiar questions about the meaning of capital punishment. This volume is essential reading for understanding the death penalty in America.
Contributors: David Garland, Douglas Hay, Randall McGowen, Michael Meranze, Rebecca McLennan, and Jonathan Simon.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814732809
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	01/25/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	241
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

David Garland is Professor of Sociology and Law at New York University. He is the author of Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition.
Randall McGowen is Professor of History at the University of Oregon and co-author of The Perreaus and Mrs. Rudd: Forgery and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century London.
Michael Meranze is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles and author of Laboratories of Virtue.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

1 Introduction: Getting the Question Right? Ways of Thinking about the Death Penalty

Randall McGowen

2 Modes of Capital Punishment: The Death Penalty in Historical Perspective

David Garland

3 The Death Penalty: Between Law, Sovereignty, and Biopolitics

Michael Meranze

4 Through the Wrong End of the Telescope: History, the Death Penalty, and the American Experience

Randall McGowen

5 Hanging and the English Judges: The Judicial Politics of Retention and Abolition

Douglas Hay

6 Interposition: Segregation, Capital Punishment, and the Forging of the Post–New Deal Political Leader

Jonathan Simon

7 The Convict’s Two Lives: Civil and Natural Death in the American Prison

Rebecca McLennan

About the Contributors

Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“[F]ascinating and well written…A worthy addition to the historical analysis of the death penalty”

-Library Journal,

“If I were asked to recommend a single book that puts the vexed and emotionally charged question of the death penalty into an intelligible historical and contemporary political perspective it would be this one. The introduction sets the stage beautifully and the essays that follow allow readers to come at the problem from a variety of mutually reinforcing perspectives. It is a model for intellectually rigorous scholarship on a morally exigent matter.”

-Thomas W. Laqueur,Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley

“This is a book that gives profoundly important answers, but not easy ones. Six leading figures discuss the American death penalty in this volume. All six leave us wondering whether the simple stories we like to tell can possibly be adequate.&8221;

-James Q. Whitman,Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law, Yale Law School

"Reading this book is like attending a highly charged graduate-level symposium. The essays are fascinating and well written but assume familiarity with the material... What distinguishes this volume is the contributing editors' refusal to accept conventional analysis of the death penalty... Academics and serious scholars of the death penalty will appreciate this innovative approach. A worthy addition to the historical analysis of the death penalty for knowledgeable readers."-Library Journal,

"An interesting collection that contributes to the further academic debate on capital punishment."-Jurgen Martschukat,The Journal of American History

Editorial Reviews

"This is a book that gives profoundly important answers, but not easy ones. Six leading figures discuss the American death penalty in this volume. All six leave us wondering whether the simple stories we like to tell can possibly be adequate."

James Q. Whitman

"An interesting collection that contributes to the further academic debate on capital punishment."

The Journal of American History - Jurgen Martschukat

"If I were asked to recommend a single book that puts the vexed and emotionally charged question of the death penalty into an intelligible historical and contemporary political perspective it would be this one. The introduction sets the stage beautifully and the essays that follow allow readers to come at the problem from a variety of mutually reinforcing perspectives. It is a model for intellectually rigorous scholarship on a morally exigent matter."

Thomas W. Laqueur

"An interesting collection that contributes to the further academic debate on capital punishment."-Jurgen Martschukat, The Journal of American History

“If I were asked to recommend a single book that puts the vexed and emotionally charged question of the death penalty into an intelligible historical and contemporary political perspective it would be this one. The introduction sets the stage beautifully and the essays that follow allow readers to come at the problem from a variety of mutually reinforcing perspectives. It is a model for intellectually rigorous scholarship on a morally exigent matter.”

-Thomas W. Laqueur,Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley

From the Publisher

Reading this book is like attending a highly charged graduate-level symposium. The essays are fascinating and well written but assume familiarity with the material. There has been a spate of recent books on the death penalty, including Jennifer L. Culbert's Dead Certainty, on the role of the Supreme Court in death penalty cases; Raymond Paternoster and others' The Death Penalty, a survey of the history and issues; and Frank R. Baumgartner and others' The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence. What distinguishes this volume is the contributing editors' refusal to accept conventional analysis of the death penalty. For example, Garland (sociology, New York Univ.) provides a concise introduction to the death penalty's use by governments from the Middle Ages to the present; Michael Meranze (history, Univ. of California, Los Angeles) challenges conventional wisdom that the Supreme Court will end the death penalty; and Randall McGowen (history, Univ. of Oregon) takes on the doctrine of American exceptionalism, cited as the norm by other authors. VERDICT Academics and serious scholars of the death penalty will appreciate this innovative approach. A worthy addition to the historical analysis of the death penalty for knowledgeable readers.—Harry Charles, St. Louis

Library Journal