Executing Freedom : The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States / Daniel LaChance.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lachance, Daniel, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Capital punishment--United States.

Capital punishment.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (275 pages)

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [2016]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

In the mid-1990s, as public trust in big government was near an all-time low, 80% of Americans told Gallup that they supported the death penalty. Why did people who didn't trust government to regulate the economy or provide daily services nonetheless believe that it should have the power to put its citizens to death? That question is at the heart of Executing Freedom, a powerful, wide-ranging examination of the place of the death penalty in American culture and how it has changed over the years. Drawing on an array of sources, including congressional hearings and campaign speeches, true crime classics like In Cold Blood, and films like Dead Man Walking, Daniel LaChance shows how attitudes toward the death penalty have reflected broader shifts in Americans' thinking about the relationship between the individual and the state. Emerging from the height of 1970s disillusion, the simplicity and moral power of the death penalty became a potent symbol for many Americans of what government could do-and LaChance argues, fascinatingly, that it's the very failure of capital punishment to live up to that mythology that could prove its eventual undoing in the United States.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction. When Bundy Buckles Up

Chapter 1. "Inside Your Daddy's House": Capital Punishment and Creeping Nihilism in the Atomic Age

Chapter 2. "The Respect Which Is Due Them as Men": The Rise of Retribution in a Polarizing Nation

Chapter 3. Fixed Risks and Free Souls: Judging and Executing Capital Defendants after Gregg v. Georgia

Chapter 4. Shock Therapy: The Rehabilitation of Capital Punishment

Chapter 5. "A Country Worthy of Heroes": The Old West and the New American Death Penalty

Chapter 6. Father Knows Best: Capital Punishment as a Family Value

Epilogue. Disabling Freedom

Notes

Index

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780226066721

022606672X

OCLC:

961271887