Download or read book Literature and Criminal Justice in Antebellum America written by Carl Ostrowski and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States set about defining and reforming its criminal justice institutions during the antebellum years, just as an innovative, expanding print culture afforded authors and publishers unprecedented opportunities to reflect on these important social developments. Carl Ostrowski traces the impact of these related historical processes on American literature, identifying a set of culturally resonant narratives that emerged from criminal justice-related discourse to shape the period's national literary expression. Drawing on an eclectic range of sources including newspaper arrest reports, prison reform periodicals, popular literary magazines, transatlantic travel narratives, popular crime novels, anthologies of prison poetry, and the memoirs of prison chaplains, Ostrowski analyzes how authors as canonical as Nathaniel Hawthorne and as obscure as counterfeiter/poet/prison inmate Christian Meadows adapted, manipulated, or rejected prevailing narratives about criminality to serve their artistic and rhetorical ends. These narratives led to the creation of new literary subgenres while also ushering in psychological interiority as an important criterion by which serious fiction was judged. Ostrowski joins and extends recent scholarly conversations on subjects including African American civic agency, literary sentimentalism, outsider authorship, and the racial politics of antebellum prison reform.
Download or read book Domestic Intimacies written by Brian Connolly and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2014-04-03 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although it is commonly thought that incest has been taboo throughout history, nineteenth-century Americans evinced a great cultural anxiety that the prohibition was failing. Theologians debated the meaning and limits of biblical proscription, while jurists abandoned such injunctions and invented a new prohibition organized around the nuclear family. Novelists crafted fictional tales of accidental incest resulting from the severed ties between public and private life, while antislavery writers lamented the ramifications of breaking apart enslaved families. Phrenologists and physiologists established reproduction as the primary motivation of the incest prohibition while naturalizing the incestuous eroticism of sentimental family affection. Ethnographers imagined incest as the norm in so-called primitive societies in contrast to modern civilization. In the absence of clear biological or religious limitations, the young republic developed numerous, varied, and contradictory incest prohibitions. Domestic Intimacies offers a wide-ranging, critical history of incest and its various prohibitions as they were defined throughout the nineteenth century. Historian Brian Connolly argues that at the center of these convergent anxieties and debates lay the idea of the liberal subject: an autonomous individual who acted on his own desires yet was tempered by reason, who enjoyed a life in public yet was expected to find his greatest satisfaction in family and home. Always lurking was the need to exercise personal freedom with restraint; indeed, the valorization of the affectionate family was rooted in its capacity to act as a bulwark against licentiousness. However it was defined, incest was thus not only perceived as a threat to social stability; it also functioned to regulate social relations—within families and between classes as well as among women and men, slaves and free citizens, strangers and friends. Domestic Intimacies overturns conventional histories of American liberalism by placing the fear of incest at the heart of nineteenth-century conflicts over public life and privacy, kinship and individualism, social contracts and personal freedom.
Download or read book Troublesome Women written by Erica Rhodes Hayden and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2019-02-08 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the lived experiences of women lawbreakers in the state of Pennsylvania from 1820 to 1860 through the records of more than six thousand criminal court cases. By following these women from the perpetration of their crimes through the state’s efforts to punish and reform them, Erica Rhodes Hayden places them at the center of their own stories. Women constituted a small percentage of those tried in courtrooms and sentenced to prison terms during the nineteenth century, yet their experiences offer valuable insight into the era’s criminal justice system. Hayden illuminates how criminal punishment and reform intersected with larger social issues of the time, including questions of race, class, and gender, and reveals how women prisoners actively influenced their situation despite class disparities. Hayden’s focus on recovering the individual experiences of women in the criminal justice system across the state of Pennsylvania marks a significant shift from studies that focus on the structure and leadership of penal institutions and reform organizations in urban centers. Troublesome Women advances our understanding of female crime and punishment in the antebellum period and challenges preconceived notions of nineteenth-century womanhood. Scholars of women’s history and the history of crime and punishment, as well as those interested in Pennsylvania history, will benefit greatly from Hayden’s thorough and fascinating research.
Download or read book Masterless Men written by Keri Leigh Merritt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-08 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the lives of the Antebellum South's underprivileged whites in nineteenth-century America.
Download or read book Slavery on Trial written by James Campbell and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the mid-nineteenth century, Richmond was one of the preeminent industrial centers in the South, with a level of criminal activity that reflected its size. Slavery on Trial examines more than 7,000 criminal cases recorded between 1830 and 1860, ranging from sensational murders to minor misdemeanors. Although the criminal justice system in antebellum Virginia was explicitly designed to support slaveholders' rule, James Campbell reveals that, in practice, trials and punishments sometimes subverted elite interests. Rather than serving as an unproblematic prop of the slave regime, law enforcement and court proceedings in Richmond revealed class, race, and gender tensions. Campbell shows that considerations of race and slavery infused every criminal case in Richmond, even when slaves were not directly involved as victims or defendants. He also considers the relationship between judicial processes and social, cultural, and political developments in the city. Slavery on Trial is a sobering portrait of the administration of racially constructed laws. It exposes the contradictions inherent in antebellum Southern law, and examines the implications those contradictions had for slaves, free blacks, poor whites, immigrants, and women.
Download or read book Literary Executions written by John Cyril Barton and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In Literary Executions, John Barton analyzes nineteenth-century representations of, responses to, and arguments for and against the death penalty in the United States. The author creates a generative dialogue between artistic relics and legal history. Novels, short stories, poems, and creative nonfiction engage with legislative reports, trial transcripts, legal documents, newspaper and journal articles, treatises, and popular books (like The Record of Crimes and The Gallows, the Prison, and the Poor House), all of which participated in the debate over capital punishment. Barton focuses on several canonical figures--James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lydia Maria Child, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Theodore Dreiser--and offers new readings of their work in light of the death penalty controversy. Barton also gives close attention to a host of then-popular-but-now-forgotten writers--particularly John Neal, Slidell MacKenzie, William Gilmore Simms, Sylvester Judd, and George Lippard--whose work helped shape or was in turn shaped by the influential anti-gallows movement. As illustrated in the book's epigraph by Samuel Johnson -- "Depend upon it Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully" -- Barton argues that the high stakes of capital punishment dramatize the confrontation between the citizen-subject and sovereign authority. In bringing together the social and the aesthetic, Barton traces the emergence of the modern State's administration of lawful death. The book is intended primarily for literary scholars, but cultural and legal historians will also find value in it, as will anyone interested in the intersections among law, culture, and the humanities"--
Download or read book A History of Crime and the American Criminal Justice System written by Mitchel P. Roth and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-10 with total page 761 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a history of crime and the criminal justice system in America, written particularly for students of criminal justice and those interested in the history of crime and punishment. It follows the evolution of the criminal justice system chronologically and, when necessary, offers parallels between related criminal justice issues in different historical eras. From its antecedents in England to revolutionary times, to the American Civil War, right through the twentieth century to the age of terrorism, this book combines a wealth of resources with keen historical judgement to offer a fascinating account of the development of criminal justice in America. A new chapter brings the story up to date, looking at criminal justice through the Obama era and the early days of the Trump administration. Each chapter is broken down into four crucial components related to the American criminal justice system from the historical perspective: lawmakers and the judiciary; law enforcement; corrections; and crime and punishment. A range of pedagogical features, including timelines of key events, learning objectives, critical thinking questions and sources, as well as a full glossary of key terms and a Who’s Who in Criminal Justice History, ensures that readers are well-equipped to navigate the immense body of knowledge related to criminal justice history. Essential reading for Criminal Justice majors and historians alike, this book will be a fascinating text for anyone interested in the development of the American criminal justice system from ancient times to the present day.
Download or read book The Pursuit of Justice written by David J. Bodenhamer and published by Dissertations-G. This book was released on 1986 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Roots of Disorder written by Christopher Waldrep and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every white southerner understood what keeping African Americans "down" meant and what it did not mean. It did not mean going to court; it did not mean relying on the law. It meant vigilante violence and lynching. Looking at Vicksburg, Mississippi, Roots of Disorder traces the origins of these terrible attitudes to the day-to-day operations of local courts. In Vicksburg, white exploitation of black labor through slavery evolved into efforts to use the law to define blacks' place in society, setting the stage for widespread tolerance of brutal vigilantism. Fed by racism and economics, whites' extralegal violence grew in a hothouse of more general hostility toward law and courts. Roots of Disorder shows how the criminal justice system itself plays a role in shaping the attitudes that encourage vigilantism. "Delivers what no other study has yet attempted. . . . Waldrep's book is one of the first systematically to use local trial data to explore questions of society and culture." -- Vernon Burton, author of "A Gentleman and an Officer": A Social and Military History of James B. Griffin's Civil War
Download or read book Double Character written by Ariela J. Gross and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking study of the law and culture of slavery in the antebellum Deep South takes readers into local courtrooms where people settled their civil disputes over property. Buyers sued sellers for breach of warranty when they considered slaves to be physically or morally defective; owners sued supervisors who whipped or neglected slaves under their care. How, asks Ariela J. Gross, did communities reconcile the dilemmas such trials raised concerning the character of slaves and masters? Although slaves could not testify in court, their character was unavoidably at issue--and so their moral agency intruded into the courtroom. In addition, says Gross, "wherever the argument that black character depended on management by a white man appeared, that white man's good character depended on the demonstration that bad black character had other sources." This led, for example, to physicians testifying that pathologies, not any shortcomings of their master, drove slaves to became runaways. Gross teases out other threads of complexity woven into these trials: the ways that legal disputes were also affairs of honor between white men; how witnesses and litigants based their views of slaves' character on narratives available in the culture at large; and how law reflected and shaped racial ideology. Combining methods of cultural anthropology, quantitative social history, and critical race theory, Double Character brings to life the law as a dramatic ritual in people's daily lives, and advances critical historical debates about law, honor, and commerce in the American South.
Download or read book Liberalism Theology and the Performative in Antebellum American Literature written by Patrick McDonald and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-19 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1850s United States witnessed a far-reaching political, social, and economic crisis. Symptomatic of this, a wide range of narrative fiction from sentimental novels to sensational drama identifies a foundational link between liberal institutions and performative utterances. Auctions, trials, marriages, and contracts, this fiction contends, all depend on the self-constituting authority of words and performances which anybody and everybody can appropriate and are always subject to misfiring. Rather than viewing this as a liberatory and egalitarian political force, however, writers from Herman Melville and James Fenimore Cooper to Captain Mayne Reid and E.D.E.N. Southworth insist that such naked authority must be supplemented. A broad swath of 1850s literature insists that this supplement ought to come from Christianity. Anticipating thinkers like Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, these works suggest that legitimate political authority depends upon its ability to represent Christian transcendence and account for revealed truth, something firmly outside of speech acts’ and performance’s purview. In so doing, this diverse body of fiction registers a desire to reconstitute political authority on transcendent and representable ground, augmenting institutional reliance on mere words and assuaging the contemporary crises of confidence and authority.
Download or read book Slavery Surveillance and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature written by Kelly Ross and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-30 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature argues for the existence of deep, often unexamined, interconnections between genre and race by tracing how surveillance migrates from the literature of slavery to crime, gothic, and detective fiction. Attending to the long history of surveillance and policing of African Americans, the book challenges the traditional conception of surveillance as a top-down enterprise, equally addressing the tactics of sousveillance (watching from below) that enslaved people and their allies used to resist, escape, or merely survive racial subjugation. Examining the dialectic of racialized surveillance and sousveillance from fugitive slave narratives to fictional genres focused on crime and detection, the book shows how these genres share a thematic concern with the surveillance of racialized bodies and formal experimentation with ways of telling a story in which certain information is either rendered visible or kept hidden. Through close readings of understudied fugitive slave narratives published in the 1820s and 1830s, as well as texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Hannah Crafts, and Harriet Jacobs, Ross analyzes the different ways white and black authors take up these issues in their writing--from calming white fears of enslaved rebellion to abolishing slavery--and demonstrates how literary representations ultimately destabilize any clear-cut opposition between watching from above and below. In so doing, the book demonstrates the importance of race to surveillance studies and claims a greater role for the impact of surveillance on literary expression in the US during the era of slavery.
Download or read book The Men of Mobtown written by Adam Malka and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-03-22 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if racialized mass incarceration is not a perversion of our criminal justice system's liberal ideals, but rather a natural conclusion? Adam Malka raises this disturbing possibility through a gripping look at the origins of modern policing in the influential hub of Baltimore during and after slavery's final decades. He argues that America's new professional police forces and prisons were developed to expand, not curb, the reach of white vigilantes, and are best understood as a uniformed wing of the gangs that controlled free black people by branding them—and treating them—as criminals. The post–Civil War triumph of liberal ideals thus also marked a triumph of an institutionalized belief in black criminality. Mass incarceration may be a recent phenomenon, but the problems that undergird the "new Jim Crow" are very, very old. As Malka makes clear, a real reckoning with this national calamity requires not easy reforms but a deeper, more radical effort to overcome the racial legacies encoded into the very DNA of our police institutions.
Download or read book The Collapse of American Criminal Justice written by William J. Stuntz and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-30 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rule of law has vanished in America’s criminal justice system. Prosecutors decide whom to punish; most accused never face a jury; policing is inconsistent; plea bargaining is rampant; and draconian sentencing fills prisons with mostly minority defendants. A leading criminal law scholar looks to history for the roots of these problems—and solutions.
Download or read book Between Freedom and Bondage written by Christopher Malone and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-09-10 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between Freedom and Bondage looks at the fluctuations of black suffrage in the ante-bellum North, using the four states of New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Rhode Island as examples. In each of these states, a different outcome was obtained for blacks in their quest to share the vote. By analyzing the various outcomes of state struggles, Malone offers a framework for understanding and explaining how the issue of voting rights for blacks unfolded between the drafting of the Constitution, and the end of the Civil War.
Download or read book Criminal Injustice written by Glenn McNair and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2009-04-20 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Criminal Injustice: Slaves and Free Blacks in Georgia’s Criminal Justice System is the most comprehensive study of the criminal justice system of a slave state to date. McNair traces the evolution of Georgia’s legal culture by examining its use of slave codes and slave patrols, as well as presenting data on crimes prosecuted, trial procedures and practices, conviction rates, the appellate process, and punishment. Based on more than four hundred capital cases, McNair’s study deploys both narrative and quantitative analysis to get at both the theory and the reality of the criminal procedure for slaves in the century leading up to the Civil War. He shows how whites moved from the utopian innocence of the colony’s original Trustees, who envisioned a society free of slavery and the depravity it inculcated in masters, to one where slaveholders became the enforcers of laws and informal rules, the severity of which was limited only by the increasing economic value of their slaves as property. The slaves themselves, regarded under the law both as moveable property and--for the purposes of punishment--as moral agents, had, inevitably, a radically different view of Georgia’s slave criminal justice system. Although the rules and procedures were largely the same for both races, the state charged and convicted blacks more frequently and punished them more severely than whites for the same crimes. Courts were also more punitive in their judgment and punishment of black defendants when their victims were white, a pattern of disparate treatment based on race that persists to this day. Informal systems of control in urban households and on rural plantations and farms complemented the formal system and enhanced the power of slaveowners. Criminal Injustice shows how the prerogatives of slavery and white racial domination trumped any hope for legal justice for blacks.
Download or read book Pillars of Salt Monuments of Grace written by Daniel A. Cohen and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Commonwealth Center Studies in American Culture series presents innovative scholarship in the multidisciplinary study of American society and culture. Based on a nationally competitive search and sustained by a two-year fellowship at the Commonwealth Center for the Study of American Culture at the College of William and Mary, the series introduces the work of important young scholars and is both contemporary in approach and enduring in quality. Starting with the insight that crime and punishment have been among the most persistent and pervasive themes of American popular culture, this book demonstrates a major shift in their depiction from the colonial period to the Civil War. Through the systematic study of hundreds of early books, pamphlets, and broadsides, Cohen traces the declining authority of Puritan ministers and Calvinistic notions of sin and their replacement by a romantic, pluralistic literary marketplace where new professionals--lawyers, journalists, and even fiction writers--served as leading cultural arbiters. The book begins with a comprehensive survey of the entire field of crime literature in New England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing especially on execution sermons, conversion narratives, and criminal autobiographies. It not only explores the changing arguments of orthodox clergymen but also shows how the conventions of documentary reportage that they established gradually undermined their control of the public discourse, as criminals themselves gained a sometimes defiant literary voice. In the final chapters the focus shifts to two highly publicized sexual murder cases of the nineteenth century that illustrate new attitudes toward crime and new patterns of popular literature. Recovering a lost culture of legal romanticism--featuring trial reports, romantic biographies, and fictionalized docudramas--Cohen challenges the conventional assumption that there was a growing split between law and literature during the antebellum period. To the contrary, he demonstrates how the motifs of popular fiction even infiltrated the courtroom arguments of prominent criminal lawyers. An imaginative use of unpublished court records and a wide array of popular literary sources revealing insights into early American society and culture, this fascinating book probes the forgotten origins of our modern mass media's preoccupation with crime and punishment.
