'The sentence of this court is that you be taken from this place to whence you came, and from there to a place of lawful execution, there to be hanged by the ne

Virginia's capital city knew poverty, injustice, slavery, vagrancy, substandard working conditions, street crimes, brutality, unsanitary conditions, and pandemi

Hiding the Guillotine examines the question of state involvement in violence by tracing the evolution of public executions in France. Why did the state move exe

Before 1850, all legal executions in the South were performed before crowds that could number in the thousands; the last legal public execution was in 1936. Thi

Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, Western societies abandoned public executions in favor of private punishments, primarily confinement in penite