Rites of Execution

This study examines the conflict over capital punishment in the United States and the way it transformed American culture between the revolution and the Civil War, relating the shift in rituals of punishment and attitudes toward discipline to the emergence of middle class culture. Louis Masur's handsomely written account describes how, in the 1830s, public hangings were abandoned in favour of executions in the seclusion of prison yards. Masur sees attitudes toward state killing from the Revolution to the Civil War as reflecting the nation's social thinking.