Histories of Capital Punishment in the United States

In late July, Attorney General William Barr directed the Federal Bureau of Prisons to resume the practice of execution after a prolonged period of discontinuation. Barring a successful legal challenge or reversal of policy, the five incarcerated persons now scheduled for execution will be the first federal inmates put to death since 2003.

 

Barr’s directive runs counter to recent shifts in public opinion and state practice. In the sixteen-year interval since the federal government last administered the death penalty, nine states have prohibited capital punishment, bringing the total number of those opposed to twenty-one. In many of the states where the death penalty remains legal, governors have issued moratoriums against its application, or prison officials have simply ceased to implement it.

 

Yet, proponents of the death penalty have not given up the fight. Legislators in eight states have recently introduced bills to reinstate capital punishment. Earlier this year, Colorado Democrats paused legislative efforts to ban the death penalty when it became apparent they could not muster the votes within their own party. Whether and how Barr’s directive will weigh on these campaigns remains to be seen.

 

To assist readers who would like to learn more about the history of the death penalty in the United States, the Journal of American History has compiled the following index. This index consists of seventeen book reviews printed in the JAH since 1982.

 

The titles listed below will be freely available through October 2019.

Author	Title	Reviewer	Year of Book Publication
Michael L. Radelet	The History of the Death Penalty in Colorado	Daniel LaChance	2017
Daniel LaChance	Executing Freedom: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States	Jürgen Martschukat	2016
John D. Bessler	Cruel and Unusual: The American Death Penalty and the Founders’ Eighth Amendment	Helen J. Knowles	2012
David Garland, Randall McGowen, and Meranze Michael, editors	America’s Death Penalty: Between Past and Present	Jürgen Martschukat	2011
Paul Christian Jones	Against the Gallows: Antebellum American Writers and the Movement to Abolish Capital Punishment	Louis P. Masur	2011
Stephen John Hartnett	Executing Democracy: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, vols. 1 and 2	Alan Rogers	2010 and 2012
David M. Oshinsky	Capital Punishment on Trial: Furman v. Georgia and the Death Penalty in Modern America	Alan Rogers	2010
David Garland	Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition	Scott Christianson	2010
Alan Rogers	Murder and the Death Penalty in Massachusetts	Howard W. Allen	2008
Howard W. Allen and Jerome M. Clubb	Race, Class, and the Death Penalty: Capital Punishment in American History	Jürgen Martschukat	2008
Jürgen Martschukat	Geschichte der Todesstrafe in Nordamerika: Von der Kolonialzeit bis zur Gegenwart (History of the death penalty in North America: From the colonial period to the present)	Markus Dirk Dubber	2002
Banner Stuart	The Death Penalty: An American History	Stephen Hartnett	2002
Hamm Theodore	Rebel and a Cause: Caryl Chessman and the Politics of the Death Penalty in Postwar California, 1948–1974	Scott Christianson	2001
Herbert H. Haines	Against Capital Punishment: The Anti-Death Penalty Movement in America, 1972-1994	David W. Levy	1996
Eric W. Rise	The Martinsville Seven: Race, Rape, and Capital Punishment	Michal R. Belknap	1995
Louis P. Masur	Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776-1865	Blanche Linden-Ward	1989
Philip English Mackey	Hanging in the Balance: the Anti-Capital Punishment Movement in New York State, 1776-1861	Kathleen Smith Kutolowski	1982

 

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