{"product_id":"the-death-penalty-an-american-history","title":"The Death Penalty: An American History","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe death penalty arouses our passions as does few other issues. Some view taking another persons life as just and reasonable punishment while others see it as an inhumane and barbaric act. But the intensity of feeling that capital punishment provokes often obscures its long and varied history in this country. Now  for the first time  we have a comprehensive history of the death penalty in the United States. Law professor Stuart Banner tells the story of how  over four centuries  dramatic changes have taken place in the ways capital punishment has been administered and experienced. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries  the penalty was standard for a laundry list of crimes--from adultery to murder  from arson to stealing horses. Hangings were public events  staged before audiences numbering in the thousands  attended by women and men  young and old  black and white alike. Early on  the gruesome spectacle had explicitly religious purposes--an event replete with sermons  confessions  and last minute penitence--to promote the salvation of both the condemned and the crowd. Through the nineteenth century  the execution became desacralized  increasingly secular and private  in response to changing mores. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries  ironically  as it has become a quiet  sanitary  technological procedure  the death penalty is as divisive as ever. By recreating what it was like to be the condemned  the executioner  and the spectator  Banner moves beyond the debates  to give us an unprecedented understanding of capital punishments many meanings. As nearly four thousand inmates are now on death row  and almost one hundred are currently being executed each year  the furious debate is unlikely to diminish. The Death Penalty is invaluable in understanding the American way of the ultimate punishment.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44984900649013,"sku":"ByrdShop_0674007514","price":60.84,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780674007512.jpg?v=1770842680","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-death-penalty-an-american-history","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}