America's Death Penalty

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.

• 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

An interesting collection that contributes to the further academic debate on capital punishment. - Jurgen Martschukat (The Journal of American History) 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,Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law, Yale Law School [F]ascinating and well writtenA 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 "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)