"Seven hundred years ago, executioners led a Welsh rebel named William Cragh to a wintry hill to be hanged. They placed a noose around his neck, dropped him from the gallows, and later pronounced him dead. But was he dead? While no less than nine eyewitnesses attested to his dem…
"Peter Linebaugh's groundbreaking history has become an inescapable part of any understanding of the rise of capitalism. In eighteenth-century London the spectacle of a hanging was not simply a form of punishing transgressors. Rather it evidently served the more sinister purpose…
From 1573 to 1617, Master Franz Schmidt was the executioner for the towns of Bamberg and Nuremberg. During that span, he personally executed over 350 people which keeping a journal throughout his career. A Hangman's Diary is not only a collection of detailed writings by Schmidt …
"This is the first modern, book-length study of the case of Thomas Aikenhead, the sometime University of Edinburgh student who in 1697 earned the unfortunate distinction of being the last person executed for blasphemy in Britain." "Taking a micro-historical approach, Michael F. …
"Christ's Crucifixion is one of the most recognized images in Western visual culture, and it has come to stand as a universal symbol of both suffering and salvation. But often overlooked in this symbolic language is the fact that ultimately the Crucifixion is a scene of capital …
In 1950, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested for allegedly passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union, an affair FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover labeled the "crime of the century." Their case became an international sensation, inspiring petitions, letters of…
In 1950, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested for allegedly passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union, an affair FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover labeled the "crime of the century." Their case became an international sensation, inspiring petitions, letters of…
In the summer of 1950, FBI agents arrested Julius Rosenberg and charged him with conspiracy to commit espionage. Specifically the Justice Department accused him of passing, through his brother-in-law, the 'secret of the atomic bomb' to the Soviet Union. A few weeks later they ch…
In 1950, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested for allegedly passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union, an affair FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover labeled the "crime of the century." Their case became an international sensation, inspiring petitions, letters of…
This volume focuses on a feature of executions that was unique to Renaissance Italy: the presence in prisons and on scaffolds of laymen, gathered in confraternities called "conforterie," who worked with prisoners to prepare them spiritually and psychologically for execution. The…
This volume focuses on a feature of executions that was unique to Renaissance Italy: the presence in prisons and on scaffolds of laymen, gathered in confraternities called "conforterie," who worked with prisoners to prepare them spiritually and psychologically for execution. The…
"The hangman's knot is a simple thing to tie, just a rope carefully coiled around itself up to thirteen times. But in those thirteen turns lie a powerful symbol, one of the most powerful in history, and particularly in America, whose relationship to the noose is all too deep and…