Thesiss

American Protestants from across the denominational spectrum played an integral role in designing, administering, evangelizing, and reforming the nations first prisons. Troubled by corporal and capital punishments practiced in the colonial period, they offered themselves as disc…

This dissertation explores the central importance of capital punishment in the development of a criminal justice system in Wisconsin – first as part of the Michigan Territory (1818-36), then as a separate U.S. territory (1836-48), and, finally, throughout its early years as a st…