The Death Penalty: An American History

By Thomas Smart Hughes and David Hume

The death penalty arouses our passions as does few other issues. Some view taking another person's life as just and reasonable punishment while others see it as an inhumane and barbaric act. But the intensity of feeling that capital punishment provokes often obscures its long and varied history in this country.

Now, for the first time, we have a comprehensive history of the death penalty in the United States. Law professor Stuart Banner tells the story of how, over four centuries, dramatic changes have taken place in the ways capital punishment has been administered and experienced. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the penalty was standard for a laundry list of crimes--from adultery to murder, from arson to stealing horses. Hangings were public events, staged before audiences numbering in the thousands, attended by women and men, young and old, black and white alike. Early on, the gruesome spectacle had explicitly religious purposes--an event replete with sermons, confessions, and last-minute penitence--to promote the salvation of both the condemned and the crowd. Through the nineteenth century, the execution became desacralized, increasingly secular and private, in response to changing mores. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, ironically, as it has become a quiet, sanitary, technological procedure, the death penalty is as divisive as ever.

By recreating what it was like to be the condemned, the executioner, and the spectator, Banner moves beyond the debates, to give us an unprecedented understanding of capital punishment's many meanings. As nearly four thousand inmates are now on death row, and almost one hundred are currently being executed each year, the furious debate is unlikely to diminish. The Death Penalty is invaluable in understanding the American way of the ultimate punishment.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674010833
• ISBN13: 9780674010833
• Release Date: March 2003
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 408 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Complementary readings to Banner's interesting book

There are already several good reviews on this book, so I will only suggest reading the following books on the USA in addition to Banner's: A) Dealing with constitutional and political ideas: 1) Constitutional History of the American Revolution by John Phillip Reid; 2) "America's Constitution: A Biography" by Akhil Reed Amar; 3) "Liberty's Blueprint: How Madison and Hamilton Wrote The Federalist, Defined the Constitution,...

A Superb, Even-handed History of Capital Punishment

It's a testament to the balance found in Stuart Banner's history of the death penalty in the U.S. that I'm still unsure where he stands on the controversial issue. If I had to take a position, I would say that he's probably against it, but even after reading his three-hundred page book I can't be sure. That's a remarkable feat for a subject matter that immediately unbalances many people.But "The Death Penalty: An American...

Balanced look at a controversial subject

Stuart Banner has taken on one of the more politically volatile subjects in American history and come up with a well-written book that explores the death penalty's development in this country and the related controversies.In the colonial era there were no prisons, so execution - primarily by hanging - was the only option for a myriad of crimes: not just murder, but arson, rape, burglary and in some cases, acts like blasphemy...

A History of Popular Sentiment About the Death Penalty

Prof. Banner draws on legal sources, the text of sermons and newspaper accounts to examine the evolution of popular sentiment about the death penalty over the past four centuries. I found the book enlightening on several different levels. First, changes in popular views about the rightness of the death penalty. Second, the co-evolution of popular feeling of what is "right" and the law itself. This gave me something to think...

A balanced, and well-researched overview of the subject

Having read a number of books on the subject, I would have to say that this book is about the best, providing an excellent overview of capital punishment in America. Containing recent data as well as historical accounts, the author paints a vivid picture of how capital punishment has evolved over the past three hundred years in this country.