Murder, Honor and Law

Richard F. Hamm, Associate Professor of History at the University at Albany, State University of New York, is the author of Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment: Temperance Reform, Legal Culture, and the Polity, 1880-1920, winner of the 1996 Henry Adams Prize from the Society for History in the Federal Government.

Hamm's idea of looking at four murders across seventy years to better understand perceptions of the South in the national imagination is brilliant. The scholarship is impressive, logically organized, and well written and makes a real contribution to the historiography. - Christopher Waldrep, San Francisco State University, author of The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America