Introduction: Invitation to an execution / Gordon Morris Bakken -- Politics and capital punishment: the role of judicial, legislative, and executive decisions in the practice of death / Stacy L. Mallicoat -- Conflicts of interest: business, death, and the bird court / Michael A. Pierson -- Fear, capital punishment, and order: the construction and use of capital punishment statutes in early modern England and seventeenth-century New England / Patrick Callaway -- Murder most foul: Native Americans and the evolution of the death penalty / Vanessa Gunther -- The death penalty in federal law / Lonnie Wilson -- Ovines and bovines / Ion Puschila -- Amnesty International and the death penalty: toward global abolition / Alexander Karn -- The celluloid execution: Hollywood films and capital punishment / Susanne Teepe Gaskins -- The death penalty in the south / Michael A. Powell -- The death penalty in the north / Dino E. Buenviaje -- The death penalty in the Midwest / Melody M. Miyamoto, Charles W. Showalter -- The death penalty in the great plains / John Gregory Jacobsen -- The death penalty in the Pacific Northwest / Joseph Laythe -- To do no harm: medicine and the death penalty in England and Texas / Norwood Andrews -- Means of death: methods of execution in California, 1937- |